Draft for review: ISO 8601 date work on IS 29500

[Chris Rae]

Hi guys - I do feel quite strongly about this, partly because I think there's been confusion in IS 29500 before regarding formulas and functions. Any operator in a formula is effectively a function. In your example you mention that you would not convert C2 and C1 to numbers when parsing - however, if you do not convert them to serials, there's nowhere in IS 29500 that specifies that the answer should be 1 (there's no runtime date type, and as such there's no description of how to use it).

As soon as we start heading down the route of having C1+C2 treated differently to SUM(C1,C2), I think we're doing badness.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Jesper Lund Stocholm [mailto:jesper.stocholm at ciber.dk] 
Sent: 23 July 2010 02:50
To: rjelliffe at allette.com.au; e-sc34-wg4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: RE: Draft for review: ISO 8601 date work on IS 29500

Hi Rick

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rjelliffe at allette.com.au [mailto:rjelliffe at allette.com.au]
> Sent: Friday, July 23, 2010 9:56 AM
> To: e-sc34-wg4 at ecma-international.org
> Subject: RE: Draft for review: ISO 8601 date work on IS 29500
> 
> 
> > My reason for using "functions" is that we (CIBER) is in the "doc 
> > generation business" and not in the "doc consumption business" as 
> > Microsoft and others are. So we will likely be doing much more 
> > generation stuff than consumption stuff.
> 
> If the  sentence has to do with how programmers use dates in their own 
> consumer applications, it probably does not belong in a spec for
OOXML.

Well, I was trying to explain why I thought the original prose could be confusing for developers implementing OOXML. It could be read as a normative requirement, but in quite a few use cases conversion of dates to serial values will never take place.

> I thought it related to how dates were treated by the calculations in 
> the OOXML spreadsheet functions.

Yes - that was my intent when using the word "functions".

> That would be relevant and useful information.

+1


Med venlig hilsen / Best regards

Jesper Lund Stocholm

CIBER Danmark A/S
Mobil: +45 3094 5570
Email: jesper.stocholm at ciber.dk