Proposal for modifying gnucash to use exact quantities

Richard Wackerbarth rkw@dataplex.net
Wed, 2 Aug 2000 07:04:53 -0500


On Tue, 01 Aug 2000, Jason Rennie wrote:
> rkw@dataplex.net said:
> > You want the denominator in EACH account to be set so that 1/D
> > represents  exactly the smallest difference in allowable values for
> > that account.
>
> Sure.  That makes sense.  There may be some situations where
> determining the smallest difference isn't trivial, but it seems like a
> very reasonable assumption to set 1/D to that difference.

I don't think that it is that difficult in practice because the difference is 
dictated by the policy of the commerce in that commodity.

> rkw@dataplex.net said:
> > Otherwise, even though you can accurately represent each allowable
> > value by an integer, you can still represent values that are not
> > allowed and rounding  becomes much more complex.
>
> Is it safe to assume that you want to do a form of type- and/or
> error-checking?  i.e. if D=8 and I type in 0.130, GNUCash will catch my
> error and round to the nearest value in sync with D, i.e. 0.125.

On Input, that would be a policy of the GUI.
I am more concerned with the representations after they are input.