Dear list, I've just discovered that GNUmeric 1.12.9 running as a portable application on my Win7x64Prof shows the same "uncanny powers of parentheses" (W. Kahan) as Excel does. For example, if n>0, x(n) = 1/2^n, y(n) = 1- x(n), and z(n) = 1- y(n), then calculations in IEEE754 DP mode should yield z(n) = x(n) up to n = 53. This holds true in case of GNUmeric 1.12.6, which is the version shipping with my Ubuntu 13.10 x64. On the contrary, the GNUmeric portable app version 1.12.9 running on my Win7x64Prof yields z(n) = 0 for n>=50, and this is exactly equal to what XL14x64 gives me. Enclosing this difference in parentheses, i.e. defining z_p(n) = (1-y(n)), yields z_p(n) = x(n) for n <= 53, again exactly mimicking XL's output. I checked this using the newly implemented hexrep function, many thanks to the developer(s) for implementing it!!
In case somebody besides me likes the output of hexrep to show up in big endian byte order with spaces between the bytes on a little endian machine, here is my "trick": enter =upper(hexrep(some_value)) in cell XY, and =right(XY,2)&" "&mid(XY,13,2)&" "&mid(XY,11,2)&" "&mid(XY,9,2)&" "&mid(XY,7,2)&" "&mid(XY,5,2)&" "&mid(XY,3,2)&" "&left(XY,2) in the cell where you want the "pretty print" version of hexrep to show up. So my question is whether introducing these "magic brackets" on Win happens because GNUmeric calls some Win dlls, or wether it has been explicitly added in order to exactly mimic XL? FYI: all forks of openoffice I managed to get my hands on yield the correct result for n <= 48 only, and do not implement "magic brackets". All the best Schorsch _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
