On Sun, 28 Jan 2001 16:01:54 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Duncan Murdoch)
wrote in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>On 28 Jan 2001 04:04:04 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Konrad
>Halupka) wrote:
>>Look up three papers which have been previously published in the PCPRo,
>>all by the same author, I guess.
>>
>>http://www.woodleyside.co.uk/stats.htm
I responded:
>The first of those quotes the McCullough and Wilson paper; that's the
>only part of the articles that really has any validity. The rest is a
>fairly ignorant rant about the fact that Excel and VBA are actually
>different languages (e.g. precedence of operators is different, so
>"-2^2" is interpreted as 4 in one, as -4 in the other).
The author of those articles is Jon Honeyball (you can get his email
address from his web page); I've had a short discussion with him by
email about my comment above. He's convinced me that it's actually
not a "fairly ignorant rant" after all. His main point is that for
his audience (business users of Excel), subtleties like operator
precedence are just not understood. Microsoft has extensive help
systems and offers lots of hints about possible errors, and they
*should* warn users when there are potential errors like these.
Moreover, the new versions of both Excel and VBA are likely to be
incompatible with the old ones in many ways; they should take this
opportunity to make them compatible with one another.
Duncan Murdoch
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