My apologies. I replied to the wrong message, so the context was lost. I was responding to a statement that "0^0 = 1" is not wrong mathematically. I wanted to point out that is misleading, because it is also not right mathematically. POWER(x,y) implements an arithmetic function, and I agree that is not a mathematical usage.
I rose to object based on this statement: "But returning 1 for 0^0 is not wrong. It is not wrong mathematically. It is not wrong per the ODF 1.2 standard." (I think there are strings attached to the ODF 1.2 case and those strings need to be tied, as has already been discussed.) To make amends for the diversion, I also want to offer my +1 for the following which I did not see the first time: "An interesting option would be to enable a "strict" or "audit" mode of calculation where all error-prone expressions are reported to the user. This mode would be slower than a normal calculation, but would allow us to point out things like: "1) Use of implementation-defined formulas that might impact interoperability (0^0 is one example, but there are several others) "2) Dependency on automatic string to number conversion operations that might be interpreted differently in different locales. "3) Operations that involve exact comparisons of results to constant floating numbers, something that is very risky due to round-off errors and precision limitations. "4) String operations that silently returned reasonable values despite parameters that exceeded the bounds of the string." -----Original Message----- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Monday, February 11, 2013 14:30 To: dev@openoffice.apache.org; dennis.hamil...@acm.org Subject: Re: Calc behavior: result of 0 ^ 0 On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 5:24 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: > This is not a vote. There is a statement about what is acceptable > mathematically that I cannot leave unchallenged. However, that is different > than what might or might not be acceptable computationally for a give case > and I continue to refrain from reiterating any argument about that. > > - Dennis > > MATHEMATICAL RIGHT/WRONG-NESS > > I'm sorry, I will not accept that 0^0 = 1 as a definition is "not wrong > mathematically." It is not right mathematically either. That it is > convenient to assume 0^0 = 1 in certain contexts of mathematical > *application* is different than making it part of the laws of number theory. > [ ... ] > If OpenOffice were a theorem proving system and we put in 0^0 ==1 as an axiom, then you might have a point there. But it isn't. The only entity making logical conclusions and extrapolating to other mathematical problems from the behavior of POWER() is the user. So your concern is not really valid in this context. -Rob [ ... ]
