On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 11:02 AM, Martin Michlmayr <[email protected]> wrote:

> I have a few question about moving from ledger to beancount:
>
> 1) Ledger has a "D" directive (e.g. D 1000.00 EUR).  It sets the
> default currency (operating_currency in beancount) but it also
> sets the format (so if I use D as above and then write 10 it would be
> printed as 10.00).  I don't think there's an equivalent for
> beancount, right?
>

Not specifically, though I want to implement a new option to override the
inferred precisions explicitly, that would achieve the same thing.
Right now you can set the default tolerance when it cannot be inferred from
the input numbers; that's not enough.
The precision is also inferred from the numbers parsed in the input (see
DisplayContext in the code).
Note that precision != tolerance. Precision is what numbers get rendered
to. Tolerance determines the amount of imprecision (residual) accepted
silently in balancing. But these things are related conceptually.
I think that most users would just choose to set their favorite precision
to render.
Also, it'll have separate options for the precision of units and for
cost/prices, which often demand more digits.
(One good thing about this state of affairs is that the harder work of
automatically inferring decent tolerances from inputs is already done, so
setting these won't be strictly necessary, but I'll admit it's an
ass-backwards design, setting the precisions explicitly and just using them
is way easier and could have been a good starting point. I was trying to
minimize the amount of options.)


2) "N" says that pricing information for that commodity should be
> ignored (and no price quotes are downloaded).  It's basically your
> "home currency" (operating_currency).  I don't think there's
> an equivalent, right?
>

Beancount does not itself download anything., so this does not apply.
The input is assumed all contained in the file (that's on purpose, intended
to be deterministic).
I think the closest equivalent is the operating currencies option, which
affects only reporting (and not calculations).


3) C AMOUNT1 = AMOUNT2: Specifies a commodity conversion, e.g. "C 1.00
> Kb = 1024 bytes".  Is that somehow possible in beancount?
>

No.


4) Can you "define" variables and then use them in transactions?
> e.g.
> define foo=$100
>     Expenses:Purchase             $foo
>

Neither.
I specifically kept Beancount's language a little lower level on purpose;
the idea was to define a small core of features and let the user generate
some of this data programmatically via plugins.

I'm not sure how useful those definitions would be; I've never needed them.
Most of the data I input comes from imported transactions. I have never
need to define things in that way, values are just imported and never
change. That seems only useful for "theoretical" purpose. You would never
want to put a recurring value and not check every payment--the vast
majority of real payments involve some exceptions now and then. I'd be
curious to hear about use realistic cases.

Note that you could achieve this via preprocessing, e.g., m4?


5) Has anyone done plugins for ledger's automated transactions and
> periodic postings?
>

Not AFAIK.
There's an example plugin, but it's intended more as an example than
anything else.


6) Has anyone done a table comparing ledger and beancount syntax, and
> if not, would that be of interest?
>

I'm not aware of anything like that.



--
> Martin Michlmayr
> http://www.cyrius.com/
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Beancount" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to [email protected].
> To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/
> msgid/beancount/20180329150207.e5tu6yxrklrvf5sr%40jirafa.cyrius.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Beancount" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit 
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhNV68%3DUgtvvH3mm8gXJpfFiQ72hM41f1deYMkrQN4O9EA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to