Re: [office-comment] Conceptual Problem: Ambiguity for Names used inFormulas

Patrick Durusau <> wrote on 06/02/2008 08:29:02 PM:

> David,
> 
> If I can jump in quickly on "named expression."
> 
> I note that in the formula spec you have defined a "PortableIdentifier" 
> that looks like an XML name to me. In other words, it would qualify as 
> an XML ID.
> 
> Is there some reason to not restrict the range of names for expressions?
> 


The difficulty is that range names, in Excel, can contain any characters. 
In fact they can contain even C0 range control characters not permitted in 
XML, like backspace, formfeed, end of file, etc.  So even if we restricted 
it to xsd:string, there is still work to be done by applications reading 
Excel files to clean up potential weirdness when reading legacy XLS 
documents.

So the approach where OpenFormula allows a wide range of characters in 
expression names, but recommends a portable subset, this seems reasonable.

-Rob