Jim Higgins wrote in
:

....
I could be wrong, but I don't recall a case involving MS and Lotus
over Excel/123. I recall Lotus vs Borland over 1-2-3/Quattro

Lotus did not like Excel's compatibility with 123, and targeted
specifically the / command key in Excel as knocking off Lotus' IP. The /
key was removed in later versions, and IIRC the help sections that were
designed for 123 users.

Yes, those were the days of people suing people for too much looking and
feeling. Ashton Tate were right up there in the DBase lookalike race, but
pretty much everyone was into it, and just recently we hear that SCO
didn't really own the rights to their flavour of UNIX.

The early versions of Excel did have very good compatibility. One cannot
say that about OpenOffice, last time I looked it did not support VBA, and
I use VBA to a great extent in many of by spreadsheets, so not being
prepared to port and test all the content, the brave new OpenOffice is
for beginners who don't have a large investment in VBA code.

Irrespective of the heritage of these things, it is an inexperienced and
naive programmer who doesn't check the operator precedence for the
language environment being used.

Owen