Le 10/02/2013 00:43, Rob Weir a écrit :
Spreadsheets are used by businessmen and not only mathematicians.
I think that very few mathematicians use AOO at all.
Even in the industry (in which I work for almost 15 years), MS Excel is not
used to perform high level calculations. Even the nice charts we can see from
complex tests are in fact exports from dedicated software that just give the
numbers and let MS Excel draw the chart with all the bells and whistles needed
(secondary grid, axis, legends, ...).
Real calculation is made with specific applications, often developed by the
companies to be sure they master the process.
- In 3.4.1, "=0 ^ 0" returns 1
- In 4.0, as patched by Pedro (see issue), "=0 ^ 0" would return an error
- According to ODF, valid results are 0, 1, error
In other words, the results we were giving before were entirely valid.
It just means that an acceptable shortcut was used. Giving 'error' would be
valid too (regarding the ODF compliance).
But I would not say that mathematics POV 1 as a result is valid. Even if some
tend to think that 1 is OK.
Microsoft has gone decades with treating the year 1900 as a leap year.
Should we?
Agreed, who cares what MS Excel does? It should not dictate what AOO should do.
- We lose backwards compatibility if someone was relying on the fact that
OpenOffice returns 1 as the result of "=0 ^ 0"
Correct. The fact is we have returned 1 for this calculation for over
a decade. Whether mathematicians think it is right or wrong (and they
do not all agree), that is what we did. So changing it now has the
potential to break real user spreadsheets. So this is a serious
change.
First, how many users would face such a problem when both the base and exponent
are null???
Again, real maths are not done in spreadsheets. So it's very likely the 0^0
cases would not break that many sheets and with an error, users will be able to
spot quickly the issue and adapt to prevent that situation to be calculated.
Second, and that's my main point here: you're angry about such a minor change
when you don't mind breaking the backward compatibility of the whole extensions
eco-system? See:
http://www.mail-archive.com/api@openoffice.apache.org/msg00107.html
I'm lost about the priorities... and how end-users fit in your agenda.
Hagar
