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> I've been reading various Scheme tutorials and manuals trying to figure
this out.
> I am apparently a dense person, since neither the language nor the
tutorials
> and manuals are easy for me to decipher.

In my opinion there's a steep learning curve for Scheme if you're
accustomed to imperative-style languages.  You may be dense, but this
does not constitute evidence. :-)

> report never made it into the Gnucash release, I'd have to imagine that
the report was broken and never got fixed. Too bad!

As it turns out, I've been studying the cash-flow.scm report (and
posted a patch that needs to be triaged :-), so I'll see if I can get
the "toodles" report to work and let you know what I find.  I'll try
to get to it sometime this weekend.

My comments:

Scheme is very logical and simple, a brilliant language design. The problem
is that it's *different*, both syntactically and semantically. If you are
used to C, or (may G-d help us) C++, or Fortran, Scheme is a bigger leap
from any of them than from any of them to any other of them. But once you
get it (and it doesn't take much, because the beauty is the simplicity --
Jerry Sussman and Guy Steele have found the minimal basis set), you will be
amazed at the power. The syntax, by the way, is a feature, not a bug. You
will discover this when editing Scheme programs with emacs, which knows more
about the component parts of Scheme than it does of any other language. This
is made possible by the syntactic simplicity. Cutting, copying, and pasting
chunks of code is a breeze, compared to any other language.

I highly recommend "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs",
Sussman and Abelson, to all of you who are interested in *really* learning
to program. Jerry Sussman and Hal Abelson are old friends (as is Julie
Sussman, who made an important editorial contribution to this book), but I
assure you that I am not receiving a commission :-) Get it and read it; it
will be good for you.

/Don Allen