On Sun, 25 Jun 2000 12:01:42 EST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Robert Graham Merkel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> Sorry it's taken me a while to reply, but better now than when we
> implement anything.
>
> Everything you've written so far makes sense, but I've just got a
> couple of comments on your requirements list.
>
> As well as Gnucash developers,
> users will write their own Scheme code that makes use of
> the new monetary math interface. It would be desirable to make it as
> simple as possible.
>
> Something like:
>
> (+ x y)
>
> with (money-plus x y current-unitary-precision)
>
> where x and y are variables of "type" money (and can be of any legal
> precision), and current-unitary-precision is a data structure storing
> the precision information for the result of the computation.
>
> I'm undoubtedly missing the subtleties of things here (for instance,
> is it legal to add two quantities of different precisions together)
> but a simple interface, particularly for Scheme code, is *very*
> important IMHO.
The other issue that this brings up is that there needs to be _some_
semantic designed to allow having this cope well with adding a _bunch_ of
values together, as with:
(money-plus a b c d e f g)
or
(apply money-plus txn-values-from-report)
Frankly, I don't see that this is likely to be a terribly awful problem;
if it takes a bit of work to work up how money-plus should be defined,
that doesn't strike me as a _big_ problem. Scheme is more "malleable"
than C in this manner, so I'm quite sure it will be easy enough to have
it follow whatever proves acceptable for C.
> Oh, and one other thing. Performance when doing monetary arithmetic
> is currently not an issue. As far as I can see, this isn't likely
> to change, whatever implementation we end up using. Is this the case?
I expect that there's 100 times as much processing time being devoted to
GTK; the problem with messing around with special data formats is _not_
going to be one of performance, but rather whether or not someone trying
to write some code to work with "GnuCash Numbers" in C is going to pull
out a gun and shoot someone over whatever inconvenience gets introduced...
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
"How should I know if it works? That's what beta testers are for. I
only coded it." (Attributed to Linus Torvalds, somewhere in a
posting)
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