On Nov 29, 2007 6:01 PM, Ben Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks Marbux, > I was [partially] surprised that they said Excel was the biggie, I heard > from a CCC conference, albeit a while back, that Vista had all their old > known issues, at least at the outset, that they had identified about 90% of > the most-buggy DLLs were identical to XP on the inside :) >
I wonder whether that part is accurate. It used to be that around 50 per cent of the known malware out there was embedded Word scripts. And Word has a much larger user base than Excel. On the persistent of bugs in Windows DLLs, it's much the same story with MS Office. Its major apps were designed back in the days when Bill Gates used to brag about not fixing bugs. Now they're in the spot 15 years later where it's too late; gobs of spaghetti code on top of the original bugs. There's a study I did in 2000 of all the published bugs in the Word footnote and endnote features here, <http://www.llrx.com/features/word.htm>. If you skim the tables, you'll see a lot of bugs, even data loss bugs, that have persisted for many versions. And you can infer from the version numbers for some of the persistent bugs that Word still has its original 16-bit page layout engine. (Some of those versions ran on 80086 and 80088 processors.) I haven't studied bugs in Excel and Powerpoint so closely, but I strongly suspect it's much the same story there too. E.g., at ISO, Microsoft is lobbying hard to be allowed to keep the Excel leap year bug in the OOXML specification. I doubt if they'd be defending the bug so vigorously if they could repair it other than by using pre- and post-processors, which would give them a big performance hit in loading large spreadsheets. Best regards, Marbux
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