On Sun, Aug 4, 2013, at 7:04, Harshad RJ wrote: > On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 1:57 AM, John Wiegley <[email protected]> wrote: > [...] > These considerations might lead to ambiguities. > > I feel, in the case of ledger, it is possible to take a general stand on > such problems: "the order of specification doesn't matter". So it wouldn't > matter if definitions are "made before" or "parsed before" or "processed > before", etc. The user can expect consistency of results irrespective of > how the internals of the program behave.
That's exactly why beancount chooses it this way. The file is just a database of transactions and entries, assuming that they will later be sorted by date. > > Lastly, how do you order three transactions on the same date from three > > different files, which may even be inter-dependent? > > If we take a stand about consistency as outlined above, then I imagine the > following solutions: > > - program throws an error when it finds such cases > - user then needs to manually order the specification using numbers or > time, etc > - alternatively, user opts for "auto-ordering" using a command line > flag. This is not on by default. In practice, I have found it very little of a disturbance to have multiple transactions on a same day occasionally show up in a slightly different order than the actual corresponding "real world" account. It's not a real problem. There's the occasional (and rate) unexpected intra-day negative balance that might show up, but one "fix" is not to render account balance except for the last transaction of the day. -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
