OK. So someone who has a process that takes a table of conversion factors from the web and pastes these into a spreadsheet and then uses automatic string->number conversions to do a calculation would create a spreadsheet which would work in one locale, but would break in another.

This makes me think that we shouldn't spend to much time on this area. Specify how it works today in OO (or Excel or whatever) and immediately deprecate this feature in the grammar. I think we want to be promoting a file format which encourages and supports the creation of formulas which are invariant under locale changes. Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO statements of spreadsheets. We should probably make a whole list of stuff which we'll need to define for legacy application compatibility, but which we'll want to immediately deprecate.

-Rob

Daniel Carrera <dani...@zmsl.com> wrote on 03/06/2006 03:23:18 PM: