wrote:
> Implementation-defined behaviors tend to stem from a few causes:
...
> 3) A standard created from divergent practice.
...
> I think spreadsheet formulas are mainly divergent because of #3,
Agree. But in the "0^0" case, the problem is that mathematics
itself is divergent. According to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponentiation#Zero_to_the_zero_power
"The debate has been going on at least since the early 1800s."
Even among spreadsheets, Excel returns an Error and OpenOffice.org
returns 1. Personally, I think 1 is a "more useful" answer in the
spreadsheet context, but I completely agree that Error is a completely
justifiable result.
I think this is a divergence that we can't completely close at this
time, but we can at least limit the permissible behavior to a small set
of permitted results. I think that is still termed
"implementation-defined", but if there's a better term for that, that's
fine.
--- David A. Wheeler
