"Jerry W. Lewis" wrote...
Lance Lamboy wrote:
...
I checked my copy of oocalc. (I don't use M$ products.) Much to my
chagrin it exhibited the same Excel bug.

Historically speaking, I wouldn't put the blame on Microsoft. You can
download a working copy of the original release of VisiCalc from
http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
and verify that it worked the same way. I presume that all subsequent
versions of VisiCalc used the same order of operator precedence to avoid
breaking existing applications. I do not have access to a version of
Lotus, but I presume that they utilized the same order of operator
precedence to make it easier for people to switch from VisiCalc to
Lotus. . . .

And you'd be wrong! In 123, -3^2 returns -9.

. . . MS probably adopted the same design decision for the same
reason, when they competed with Lotus (just as they preserved the Lotus
mistake of considering 1900 to be a leap year).
....

While Lotus is unquestionably to blame for the 1900-as-leap-year bug,
Microsoft actually chose to have Excel behave DIFFERENTLY than 123 in the
beginning. Now in the beginning there was only Excel for the Mac, and 123
only existed for 8086/8-based PCs, so there may have been no perceived need
for Excel to duplicate 123's operator precedence. However, once established
in the Mac world, it would have become a practical impossibility to do
anything different on PCs.

Microsoft gets all the credit/blame for aping VisiCalc rather than 123.



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