Re: [office-formula] Fwd: [office-comment] ODF Part 2 Open Formula -Whitespace between FunctionName and opening parentheses of parameter list

[Eike Rathke <eike.rathke@oracle.com>]

Hi,

On Tuesday, 2011-02-08 00:41:11 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> The following message was just posted; it looks like an error in the part 2 spec (since the report indicates an inconsistency).
> 
> Comments?
> 
> ----- Start Forwarded Message -----
> Sent: Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:50:35 -0800
> From: Martin Devlin <martin.devlin@ireland.com>
> To: office-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [office-comment] ODF Part 2 Open Formula - Whitespace between FunctionName and
>  opening parentheses of parameter list
[...]
> In Section 5.2:
[...]
>   Expression ::=
>     ....
>     FunctionName Whitespace* '(' ParameterList ')' |
>     ....
[...]
> In Section 5.14:
> "Whitespace shall be ignored just before a function name, but whitespace
> shall not separate a function name from its initial opening
> parentheses."

I digged out a mail dating back to 2006 and conclude that we may have
meant to say that whitespace is not allowed between function name and
opening parentheses:

Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 19:16:16 -0400
Subject: [office-formula] Re: [office] Syntax Comments (Weir)
From: "David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>
To: office-formula@lists.oasis-open.org
Message-id: <44EA3EC0.2010103@dwheeler.com>

| robert_weir:
[...]
| > 5.13 -- "whitespace may not separate a function name from its
| > initial opening parentheses" -- why the restriction?  Is there any
| > ambiguity from having whitespace there?
| No, not to my knowledge, directly.
| 
| The issue is disambiguating between named expressions
| and function calls, because until you get to the "(" or non-"(" you don't
| know what you have.  Requiring this means that if you hand-write your
| analyzer,
| you don't have to put in a whitespace walker there.  It's not a big deal.
| But I think Excel's display syntax would have a problem if this rule
| were relaxed,
| and it might be tricky to store whitespace if the display format
| couldn't handle it.
| So this is a mild concession to a common display format.
[...]


However, OOoCalc currently allows and if given stores a space at that
place. How about other implementations?

  Eike


-- 
Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO statements
of spreadsheets.  --Robert Weir on the OpenDocument formula subcommittee's list.

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