Re: Excel Math Bug

From: fred (fred_at_fred.frd)
Date: 08/04/04 

Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 05:16:03 GMT

> <many good points snipped for brevity>
>
> Yeah, it's a convention, but there IS an established convention in math,
> and it says -3^2 is -9. If Excel does it differently, they're using a
> different convention --- and I can understand how that would happen, in
> trying to remain compatible with older software. My guess is one of the
> original spread*** authors screwed it up, and people have been trying to
> maintain compatibility since then. Actually, I'm glad this came up --- the
> stat people in our department were tossing around the idea of using Excel
> in their courses instead of a stat package, but this is a reason for
> rejecting that idea. If Excel doesn't follow such a standard mathematical
> convention, I don't think I'd want students using it in our courses.
>
> Bruce I.
>

I'm the one who brought this up in the first place and although this
discussion
has been quite interesting I only draw from it that I was right in the first
place. The normal chalkboard, or academic math convention has been deviated
from. In my mind this is wrong. Some have given reasons for it like "since
it's digital and it can't hold a reciprocal it has to be that way" or
something along those lines. No one seems to really have any good reason.
I'm sure it's as you say. The early coders just got it wrong and were kind
of stuck with it for legacy reasons. Sort of like the Y2K situation a few
years ago. Or the language applications just didn't feel it necessary to
get the order right, it was enough to just explain in the reference manuals
'their' way of doing things.

>From my own development experience it's obvious to me that the reason many
of these people are holding some position that "it's just fine", "that's the
way it is", "user emptor", is that they don't have a lot of math experience.
They are like the dozens (or hundred) of programmers I've known over the
years who code up some screen or application that is totally unusable
because they are making ridiculous assumptions about user expectations or
user behavior. They're just coders and may be good at coding, but in the
example at hand, a subtlety was missed.

It's apparent now that many applications and/or languages don't use the
standard math conventions. Why there are so many voices saying that's okay
is mystifying. It's not okay. It's sad. But unfortunately that's what we
are stuck with. It's somewhat understandable in a language, but Excel is
more of an always-available do-everything super-calculator, not what I'd
consider a language. It should conform.

I agree with you, this is the last straw for me and I'm going to get some
real math application -- maybe Mathematica. Excel is wonderful for many
things -- charting, pivot tables, quick analyses -- and actually, I believe
the spread*** in general was responsible in large part for the growth of
PCs in the early years, but that is doesn't conform to academic math
conventions is unfortunate, and this type of thing is endemic with
consumer-grade software. Mathematica seems to be a serious,
industrial-strength application developed especially for mathematicians.
The $2000 it cost me to learn this lesson was far more than the $300 I was
considering spending for Mathematica.

Fred

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