Gnumeric Now Supports All Excel Worksheet Functions

unmadindu writes "The latest beta release of Gnumeric has been released. According the the developers, it is now ready and stable enough for general use and deployment, and the final 1.2.0 release will be made on September 8th. This release also marks the realization of a major milestone -- all of the worksheet functions in the U.S. version of MS Excel are now supported. I have been using 1.1.19 for quite some time now, and it is incredibly fast, and hugely improved compared to Gnumeric 1.0."

Comments

Re:My Experiance

[geekster]

Now why would you have an image of the goatse guy laying around, hmmm? :)

Re:But does it support faulty notation?

[Hektor_Troy]

If you write on paper -2^2=4, it's right. So spreadsheets usually do the same thing. What's wrong with that approach?

It's NOT right. That's the whole point. When doing math you follow the RULES of math. The reason "-2^2" is -4 is because of the RULES of math. "2+2" isn't the same as "2/2".

An example:

2-2*2 = -2 because multiplying takes priority over subtracting
(2-2)*2 = 2 because the ()'s take priority over anything else.

-2^2 is EXACTLY the same as "0 - (2^2)" and EXACTLY the same as "0 - (2*2)" but NOT the same as "(0-2) * (0-2)". This is about 7th grade math.

So no, -2^2 != 4 on paper. It never did, and it never will.

Re:But does it support faulty notation?

[Hektor_Troy]

(2-2)*2 = 2 because the ()'s take priority over anything else

excuse me?!

(2 - 2) * 2 == 0
0 * 2 == 0

True - that one was an obvious error on my behalf.

However:

Perhaps i'm missing something, but isn't -2^2 expanded -2 * -2?, that equals 4.

Now 2 * -2 would be -4.

-2^2 is a combination of two operators: - and ^.

a^b means a is multiplied with itself b times; it's a multiplication.

- is a subtraction.

Multiplications takes precident.

-2^2 and -(2^2) is the same thing. You can remove the ()'s and not change the result. Another way of viewing this problem is like this:

-2^2 is the same as (-1) * 2 * 2 which is the same as (-1) * 2^2.

If you want it to be the square of minus two, you have to indicate that -2 is a number and not an operator and an operand, and this is done by placing it in a set of ()'s. Since no ()'s were placed around -2, the standard rules of operator precedent are used, and multiplication has a higher priority than subtraction.

But there's no need to get up in arms over this. Go ask your 7th grade math teacher. Or any teacher who teaches math at that grade or higher. Or read up on operator precedent.

Re:But does it support faulty notation?

[gibara]

Whether -2^2 is equal to 4 or -4 completely depends on the specification of the 'arithmetic language'. But without reading any documentation, my expectation would not be -2^2=4 not -4.

The reason is that the '-' in -2 is not -1 * 2 but the unary negation operator. In most languages such operators tend to take precedence over binary operators (like ^).

It is helpful to write the negation operator with a different character (often '~' is used) to disambiguate it from subtraction. Without using an extra character, the best way to make the meaning clear is to use parenthesis (-2)^2.

That Excel claims -2^2=4 cannot be considered 'VERY wrong'.

Re:But does it support faulty notation?

[aeoo]

... 2
-2

Look above...in my mind, that translates to (-2)^2. So the paper version would evaluate to 4 and not -4.

Re:If in doubt, copy!

[Lars T.]

What the hell are you talking about?