Buddha Buck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> So, why the argument?
It's a high-priority goal of mine to make the result of this process
be a straightforward, testable, stand-alone mathematical library for
dealing with financial numbers that other people can use in their own
applications. I have received private email from several people who
want to use whatever we come up with to represent numbers in their own
accounting and financial programs. We are not the only ones who need
to exactly represent financial quantities.
I don't think the library has to be large or terribly sophisticated,
but it does need to be flexible and bring in as few assumptions as
possible about how it will be used. "Mechanism, not policy" is a
significant design goal for such a library as far as I am concerned.
I realize that this isn't completely congruent with the stated goal of
fixing the problems with gnucash, but I think that they are
compatible.
I see three general approaches to the problem on the table, which I
will call the BG, CB, and RW approaches after their proponents (BB
falls somewhere in the CB/RW continuum AFAICT). My characterizations
of the 3:
- BG : looking for a data type to represent exact non-integer
values including monetary quantities.
- CB : looking for a data type to represent exact monetary
quantities.
- RW : looking for modifications to gnucash to allow it to
represent monetary quantities using integers.
I'm more interested in solving the generic problem in a way that could
be useful for other people as well as gnucash. The first requirement
is that the solution not be so entangled with gnucash's guts that it
can't be factored out. The second requirement is that that it not be
so focused on the data types and operations that gnucash does that it
prevents use in a different context.
This may mean that if my work is to be useful it needs another layer
of API between it and gnucash. As far as I can tell, Chris Browne's
approach could be easily implemented using my data type as its
representation of values. RW's could not.
b.g.
--
Gnucash Developer's List
To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
