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by realo 440 days ago
I cannot imagine any programming language interpret "1/2" as a day and month in that specific context.

It takes a very special mindset to do that, maybe the kind that comes from a junior MBA manager, for example ... and even then I find that farfetched.

It sounds more like one of those things that is observed, but some manager decided it is not high priority enough to fix right away. And then technical debt raises its ugly head.
1 comments
hnlmorg 439 days ago
“1/2” is a string. So “1/2”+1 is either an error because of datetype mismatch (which is terrible UX for a spreadsheet or going to mean one of the following to scenarios:

    Date plus a day

    “1/2” concatenates with “1”
The latter is wrong, the former, while unexpected, does kind of make the most sense here.
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SAI_Peregrinus 439 days ago
Excel allows bare strings, so `"1/2" + 1` is a string with embedded quotation marks. So that's a third option for what to do.
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hnlmorg 439 days ago
True. And that would probably make the most sense too.

A very good point you’ve made there :)

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dmurray 439 days ago
Why would you favour "date plus a day" rather than "number plus a number"?

I agree Excel has to guess, and in isolation guessing that "1/2" should be parsed a date is not a terrible choice, and that parsing the individual components separately is simpler and more predictable than using the full context that it's about to be added to a number. But evaluating to 1.5 would raise few eyebrows.

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hnlmorg 439 days ago
> Why would you favour "date plus a day" rather than "number plus a number"?

Date is a number though. It’s only when we print them in a human readable way that they become anything else.

Whereas 1/2 is an expression.

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fragmede 439 days ago
Haven't seen "1/21" as an answer yet
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hnlmorg 439 days ago
An answer where? Not sure I follow
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fragmede 439 days ago
I just wanted to introduce "1/21" as an answer
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hnlmorg 439 days ago
Ahh I see the confusion now. I suggested it in the comment you were replying to:

> “1/2” concatenates with “1”

…and thought you’d spotted that and was saying others had disagreed with the concatenation way of handling + operators with strings.

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fragmede 439 days ago
"“1/2” concatenates with “1”" != "1/21"
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