On 02/21/2013 09:20 PM, Rob Weir wrote:
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 9:12 PM, Andrew Douglas Pitonyak
<and...@pitonyak.org> wrote:
During the long painful discussion of 0^0, there was mention of creating a
compatibility function for POWER(x,y) to match the behavior in Excel. My
understanding of how this would work is as follows.
1. Create another function such as POWER.OTHER(x,y) that behaves as desired.
2. When an Excel file is read, every instance of POWER is replaced with
POWER.OTHER.
3. When an Excel file is written, every instance of POWER.OTHER is converted
back to POWER.
A simpler solution, if you already know that you are reading an Excel
file, is to keep the function name, but change the behavior to mimic
what Excel does. So a compatibility mode rather than a different
function. If we do that, then that would eliminate most of the
complexities that you mention below.
-Rob
There are certainly many nice things that go along with this idea; for
example, you can set a configuration option to behave as some product,
and then simply modify each affected function to slightly modify the
behavior. This allows anyone to mimic the behavior at will. This is also
a much larger change.
My question was prompted by a comment made on the larger thread that
proposed this as a workable solution. If memory serves me correctly,
Libre has implemented a few alternate functions, but I do not remember
the context.
--
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
