David,
David A. Wheeler wrote:
>>>Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
>>
>>What I said is not that it wouldn't be useful or even required to get a
>>common standard for formulas within office application, but that this is
>>outside the scope of this TC, at least for the moment. From the office
>>file format view, formulas are some kind of programming model that is
>>very similar to scripts, and even may make use of scripts. For these
>>programming models, the Open Office TC can only establish methods to
>>uniquely identify programmimng models (that's what the namespaces do),
>>but cannot standardize the programming models themselves.
>
>
> I think you're unnecessarily conflating "programming models" with "formulas".
> To be useful, the specification needs to specify a minimum
> interoperable format for exchanging formulas that may use a
> set of standard functions. This specification does NOT need to
> define ANY way to define new functions; you can leave that out
> for a useful spec.
I'm not sure about this. A formula can only be interpreted by an
application if it is fully understood. If there is only a set of
standard functions then this is not sufficient.to interpret a formula,
because the non-standard function are still not known. Specifying a
useful set of standard functions itself already seems to be a challange.
From its complexity, I would consider the definition of an office
application formula language as complex as specifying a programming
language together with a base framework.
For this reason, it seems to be a better choice, at least for me, to
keep the full specification of formulas separate but uniquely identify
what "function language" is used than specifying a function language
that does not meet the requirements of office applications.
However, the TC will take your concern serious and may come back to this
topic in a later stage.
Best regards
Michael
