»iliace« wrote:
Let's have a contest to see who can write the best algorithm to parse
the arithmetic with up to 64 levels of function nesting from a text
string. You first. We'll post it up on some OpenSource discussion
board for them to decide how sloppy it is.

I doubt anyone will be able to replicate the bug... becaust it is not
caused by a sloppy parser or a sloppy calculation engine, but by a buggy
threshold value in some data representation decision that is primarily
done to save memory. So perhaps some == check was done with an epsilon
that should have been an exact ==.

Maybe reading the OOXML specs could give a hint about this
(specifically, reading how Excel stores numbers in files), but I don't
think so (I just expect OOXML to store numbers as text). The specs of
the binary XLS formats could more likely give it away, but these are not
public.

On Sep 28, 6:06 pm, "James Silverton" wrote:
Hello, All!

According tohttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21033161/
it looks like Excel is having trouble either displaying or using
2^16. I'd really like to see the sloppy code that causes this!