Here's what I'm thinking:
We have an abstract machine that does operations on dates. Dates, when
stored, are stored as ISO 8601 strings. We also define explicit and
implicit ways of converting numeric data into dates. The implict coercion
method has one or more parameters, one of which is the date basis.
I think we want to avoid talking about doing date calculations on numeric
data. Someone should be able to implement OpenFormula on a library that
does date arithmetic using any date representation, whether integer serial
numbers, floating points, Y/M/D/H/M/S records, or whatever. I don't think
we should care. What we really need to define is the type conversion.
If we state it along those lines (conceptually -- obviously the text would
need to be more fully articulated) would that do the job?
-Rob
"Andreas J. Guelzow" <> wrote on 05/15/2009
06:04:50 PM:
>
> I think what one really should want is a specification of the serial
> number matching 1904-1-1 and a statement how days and changes in serial
> numbers are related.
