On Sat, 09 May 2009 20:41:52 GMT, Owen Duffy wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote in
:

...
It's an INTENTIONAL Microsoft bug. See:

It is certainly popular to blame Microsoft with lots of things, whether
they were responsible or not matters little.

Sorry. Bad choice of wording. From my perspective, a bug is
something that works in a manner that would be considered unexpected
or fails some form of standards compliance. The order and precedence
of operators was well established and includes no distinction between
negation and subtraction. I cannot imagine an example where a
distinction would be necessary (although I am willing to be
enlightened). Whether MS can be blamed for creating the distinction
is subject to some debate, however I doubt that MS can be praised for
creating it.

Keep in mind that Microsoft did not 'design' the algebraic operator
hierarchy for Excel, Excel was released with a claim of 100% cell formula
compatibility with the then leading spreadsheet Lotus 123. (Microsoft's
compatibility was so good, it was subject of a famous court case.)

Chuckle. I once made good money cleaning up a mess of old Lotus 1-2-3
and Symphony spreadsheets so that they would run under Excel. This is
for Excel 2003:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP051986941033.aspx
There are also comparisons between other version of Excel and Lotus
1-2-3, but I can't find them. Different versions seem to have
somewhat different differences, which makes me wonder if Excel has
"evolved" their standards.

Quoting:
"Lotus 1-2-3 evaluates the exponentiation operator (^) before
the negation operator (–); Excel evaluates negation first."
So it is written, so it must be. Web pages are never wrong.

It was much later that Microsoft conceived VBA and added it to their apps.
IIRC, Visual Basic for Applications inherits its algebraic operator
hierarchy from the BASIC language which was conceived around 1964 and
enriched progressively.

Yep. Even standards change with time. It's the de facto standard of
the moment.

The "intentional Microsoft bug" perspective looks like just prejudice.

Nope. I like Microsoft. If MS actually produced a bug free,
reliable, and fully functional product, I would be out of business. As
it stands, I expect to see considerable business from MS customers, as
new versions seem to introduce more features and functions, than fixes
to old bugs. After all, features and functions sell upgrades, but bug
fixes do not. 2.999999 cheers for Microsoft.

Incidentally, the company motto is "If this stuff worked, you wouldn't
need me". None of my customers have ever disagreed.

Owen


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