Proposal for modifying gnucash to use exact quantities

[Jon Trowbridge]

On Mon, Jul 24, 2000 at 05:41:58PM -0500, Bill Gribble wrote:
>   2. gnc_commodity knows the full name of the commodity
>      ("International Business Machines", "US Dollars"), plus any
>      mnemonic or nickname that is used for trading or quoting purposes
>      ("IBM", "USD"), and the namespace in which the name is unique
>      ("NYSE", "ISO-4217").

It is more than a problem of namespace collisions in some areas.  In
the futures markets, there are *no* standard for the mnemonic/"symbol"
used for the various markets.  The exchange might use one symbol, data
vendors another, and different brokers will use another one still.

For example, my company's database shows that the Australian 3-year
Gov't Bond contract traded on the Syndey Futures Exchange is
alternatively known as HT, YS and YTT.  Orange Juice futures are known
sometimes as OJ and sometimes as JO, depending on who you are talking
to.  I could go on and on...

This is a pain in the ass in a number of different applications:
processing historical price data from different data vendors, parsing
electronically transmitted info from brokers, etc.

IMHO, the gnc_commodity API should show some flexibility in this area,
rather than just mapping each commodity to one allegedly canonical
abbreviation.

-JT

-- 
GNU/Linux: Free your mind and your OS will follow.