Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Releases Office Binary Formats

Posted by kdawson on from the this-way-lies-madness dept.

Microsoft has released documentation on their Office binary formats. Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn't. stm2 points us to some good advice from Joel Spolsky to programmers tempted to dig into the spec and create an Excel competitor over a weekend that reads and writes these formats: find an easier way. Joel provides some workarounds that render it possible to make use of these binary files. "[A] normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated; are the product of a demented Borg mind; were created by insanely bad programmers; and are impossible to read or create correctly. You'd be wrong on all four counts."

3 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Joel by Jamu · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Taking bad examples of code and using them as proof that the other method is good is hardly a convincing argument for Hungarian. I can see how it's useful for some langauges, but C++? Someone enlighten me: What is a convincing argument for using Hungarian in a strongly typed language?

    --
    Who ordered that?
  2. Re:L&O: sFoo by man_of_mr_e · · Score: 1, Redundant

    What is the justification for putting that semantic meaning into a variable name, instead of incorporating it into class definitions?

    Hungarian is not so necessary in this day of extensive IDE support, but back when it was invented it was useful because simply looking at a variable name did not give you any idea of what type it was, requiring you to frequently jump around in code you were maintaining.

    Let's say you open up some code to fix a bug. You see a variable named "windows_coords". What is it? A RECT structure? A CRect class? An array of ints? An array of floats or doubles? Something the programmer wrote himself? You have to go look at it's definition (which usually involes greping the code) which completely throws off your train of thought.

    Nowadays, you just have to hover your mouse over the name it most IDE's will tell you, which makes hungarian a bit vestigular.

    --
    If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
  3. Re:Joel by encoderer · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Yeah, that's wrong.

    I'm sorry, bro.

    It just is.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation