[GNC-dev] Register + Unicode (was Re: emojis everywhere...)

Eric Siegerman pub08-gnc at davor.org
Sun Apr 8 02:30:02 EDT 2018


On Sat, Apr 07, 2018 at 08:20:35PM -0700, John Ralls wrote:
> Depends on what you see as the bug.

The bug is the inconsistency.  I have opinions, for what they're
worth, on how it should behave:
  - Reverting to the old value is better than clobbering to zero;
    if it can't change the field to what I asked for (because
    what I asked for was bogus) it shouldn't change it at all

  - Leaving the bogus input in Debit, and only cleaning it up on
    exit from Credit, is kind of ugly and could be confusing

But far outweighing those is that all variations should behave
the *same* way.

None of the current behaviours give incorrect results in the end;
it's just a usability thing -- which is why I called my complaint
nitpicky.

> I suppose there should be a message box when you hit <Enter> instead of just leaving you focused on the erroneous field with no clue that GnuCash is declining to process your bogus input.

What I personally would prefer instead of a dialog that one has
to dismiss is a simple beep, like vi used to do on error, when
you were using an actual serial terminal.  But I pretty much
expect to be outvoted on that...

> Another problem that you didn’t explore is that GnuCash may recognize only code points 0x2b-0x39 as numbers, delimiters, and operators, so users trying to use localized number representations may fail. That would be a libc failure rather than a GnuCash one, but I don’t have a lot of confidence in libc’s localization mechanisms.

You're right; I can see that being a problem.  If it's libc's
fault, though, it's likely to be platform-dependent, isn't it?
That adds another dimension to the difficulty of trying to fix it
in application code.

> Perhaps fortunately I think most of the world is resigned to using European numbers and symbols for representing money.

Semi-resigned.  I have some souvenir Nepali and UAE currency left
over from a trip, and each country's bills contain both their own
and Western[*] numbers, and their own and English text.  I
suspect you're right, though, that people are rather more
resigned to doing things our way when computers are involved.

[*] We call our numerals "Arabic", but most(?) of the Arab world
actually uses different ones -- somewhat related to ours, but not
closely enough to be very legible to my Anglo eyes.  I believe
ours are descended from a regional variant that was, and is, used
only in parts of North Africa -- and thus in Moorish Spain, from
where the rest of Europe got them.

  - Eric


More information about the gnucash-devel mailing list