Proposal for modifying gnucash to use exact quantities

Timothy Reaves treaves@silverfields.com
Wed, 02 Aug 2000 20:23:09 -0400


    First of all, you are misusing the term commodity.

    Secondly,  three eighths of a dollar less 30 cents leaves eight cents.
The Standard Accounting Practices require five to be rounded up, at the end
of a transaction.  You need to keep 40 decimal places of precision through
out the transaction, then round with five to nine going up, and one to four
going down.

    You can not say that $3/8 + $3/8 = $0.74.  Legally it equals $0.375 +
$0.375 = $0.75 = $6/8 = $3/4. We keep the fourty places becaus at the end
of the transaction there is less overall rounding error.

    Now, having stated that, it would be silly to allow entry of
fractions.  Even the stock & commodity markets have dropped fractions and
gone to decimals.



Buddha Buck wrote:

> At 11:25 AM 8/2/00 -0400, Jason Rennie wrote:
>
> >bmbuck@14850.com said:
> > > I view "$/8 USD" and "$/100 USD" to be -similar- commodities.  You
> > > can't  add or subtract them, but comparison should be possible.
> >
> >Is it true that you would *never* want to add/subtract such
> >commodities?  I can't think of any cases where you would want to, but
> >should we building this assumption into our underlying data
> >representation?
>
> Yes.
>
> What is the result of $3/8 USD - $0.30 USD?  I can think of several
> reasonable, but wrong (IMHO) answers: