Hello,
 
First a warning : my programming is very rusty, I'm sort of starting all over again with KDE. I'm only taking my first steps though, but working through the turorials, I'm happy to see that some of my former knowledge regarding C++ is still there :-)
 
Anyway, I find the whole Koffice project, and Kspread in particular very inspiring.
 
I have been browsing through the code (WEBCVS because my linux pc is not online, first I have to iron out some WLan issues :-(  ) and one of the areas that I would like to be involved in is the functions-area.
 
I read the old (8/4/02) post by Ariya concerning functions. I understand since then some 100 functions have been added, so the library is already well developed.
 
Some questions that I have.
 
1. About Excel compatibility...In order to be compatible with Excel the functions should be the same, same name, same parameter list. Right? Or is there another route already followed by the filter? Or should we provide for a series of "Excel" functions (this could be a separate category in the picklist) just to provide compatibility and ease of use for exel users. They could then continue to use their old functions, just by adding E_ at the front or something like that. I remember Excel having lotus123 compatibility (duplicating the menu structure) at a certain point.
 
2. Excel provides translation of the functions in the different languages that are supported, but I don't know if internally they are tokenized. I'll test that in the coming days. Do we, should we provide translations of the function names?
 
3. What about copyrights on mathematical numerical methods. Does anyone have experienxe with this. I have some expertise in the financial area myself, and I would like to develop some advanced financial functions. I found a library (written, no code) of financial functions on the web ( http://finance.bi.no/~bernt/gcc_prog/ ) that would be very useful. In this case they are explicitely under GNU licence, so usable, right. But what about the scores of published methods? Does the book copyright prevails, or does the character of the thing change as soon as I transform it into an algoritm?
 
4. As I am new, I suppose that I have to submit possible patches or code to some of you more experienced guys...but don't expect things very soon. First I have still a lot of studying to do, and I am very busy professionaly as well...but I'd like to get involved very much.
 
Regards
 
Marc