"Dennis E. Hamilton" <> wrote on 01/28/2010
06:49:57 PM:
>
> RE: [office-formula] serial number? Don't we mean serial date?
>
> Yes, I have been arguing for two ambient properites (nice term),
>
I took the term from how Microsoft describes OLE/ActiveX controls. There,
an ambient property is a exposed by the control container (the thing you
are embedding a control in) and defines things like UI locale, background
color, default font, etc., -- the things you need to know to make a
control blend in well in a given container.
There is an analogous case here, where we have a container, abstractly at
least, where the formula evaluator is embedded. The context provided by
the container will include things like locale, date origin, etc. We
should probably start tracking a list of these items. What are all the
things a formula evaluator needs to know about other than the text of the
formula itself? What are the parameters of our abstract machine?
-Rob
