Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
The objective is to achieve consensus. I believe it is clear that there is no consensus on the proposed change and the proposal fails.
I still have to see some credible arguments here, since most of the feedback was misplaced. What we learned so far is:
1) Nobody so far exhibited a spreadsheet that would be broken by the new behavior. Rob has one, which was even published, so I'm sure he can share it for everybody to have a look. Even better, we have a fantastic collection of Calc templates at http://templates.openoffice.org/en/taxonomy/term/3923 ; seeing one of those templates break would help.
2) Everybody feels the need to say something about 0 ^ 0, but threads like this one are not pleasant to read. If you have nothing to say, please don't say anything. And if you have a lot to say, please limit yourself to what's strictly needed. Especially, undoing a volunteer's work without some concrete (in ODF format, in this case!) reasons is something the project must avoid.
3) Mathematics and the standards are two different worlds. If a standard is mathematically wrong, change the standard and come back.
4) We implement a standard, ODF. There 0 ^ 0 can legitimately be evaluated to 0, 1 or an error.
5) We read another standard, OOXML. There 0 ^ 0 can only be evaluated as an error; the fact that OpenOffice will evaluate 0 ^ 0 from a XLSX file to 1 is a bug.
6) Anyone whose spreadsheets depend on 0 ^ 0 being evaluated to 1 (or to zero, or to an error for that matter) has entered the dangerous world of "implementation-defined" behavior: even if you save in a standard format like ODF, your spreadsheet depends on a particular ODF implementation (e.g., on the specific version of OpenOffice you used).
Based on 5 and 6 I would actually still believe that it's good to evaluate 0 ^ 0 to error (so that we fix the bug in 5 and we choose the most strict behavior in 6). But I fully agree with Marcus in saying this issue is much smaller than the discussion around it, so I can surely change my opinion if I finally see some real-world spreadsheets impacted by the change. When we have those, also Pedro will likely see reasons for reverting the change. In short: provide concrete examples and everybody will be happy.
Regards, Andrea.
