Year end reports

[Terry Therneau]

  Three questions/comments
  
  1. I've been using Gnucash for the last 8-9 months, after ~10 years of 
Quicken.  (The DOS version, run in a Unix dosemu window --- why change when 
something works?  But I needed to upgrade to Ubuntu for other reasons, and
couldn't get it to run.)   I'm having troubles with reports.  What I'd really
like is what Q called "itemized category", which was a sum of all expenses by
category/ subtotal by subcategory.  I do this to 
    The manual section that I can find on reports is very thin, lists names but
almost no detail.  Am I overlooking some documentation?  
    If not, what report would work? 
    
  2. Even better would be the ability to export the data.  I would read it into 
the S language ("R" is the GPL implementation, "S-Plus" the commercial one)
and do my reports there.  This would make any number of summaries, reports, or 
graphs very simple to create.  It happens to be what that language was designed
to do.  (I'm a statistician working in medical research.  Studies can cost
thousands to millions of dollars, so the resultant data is looked at from
every angle.)  
   My first try was to take the transaction report, choose options to remove 
subtotals, get the right columns, etc.  If I could save this as text it would
be easy for me to import, but cut/paste doesn't work!  Parsing the html is going
to be a lot harder.  (BTW, reading a complete transaction report is how I got
my data into gnucash in the first place -- my version of Quicken predated QIF
output.  Read it into S, and then wrote my own qif).

   What's the best way to output all the transactions from a given date range?      
   

 3. The whole thread on "year end" has been fun to read.  Some comments
 
  - I think that simple export is the best tool.  The package will never contain
all the reports that people might want, nor be able to support all the packages
that users might use.  My point 2 above is a good case: no one had yet mentioned
MY favorite language in the debate!  I will go back and look at the gnucash to 
sql thread.  But if I could add one report it would be a "export selected data
as a text file".  

  - MikeorPenny Novak claim that all languages can be written well.  I think
that there are some notable counterexamples.  APL, which I once knew very
well, has been described as a "write only" code -- and I agreed with that
statement even then, when I first fell in love with the language.  It had many
groundbreaking ideas, which thankfully influenced other languages which were
not so unforgivably terse.  But the best counterexample has to be MUMPS, a 
language once popular in medical laboratory systems, and unfortunately not yet
quite eradictated.  Variable names are limited to 2 characters for instance,
and all comments and extra spacing minimized to increase exectution speed. 
  
  - Lovers of Lisp and its offspring such as scheme are often passionate about
the language's ease of learning, coding, and/or purity.  But they continue to
remain a tiny fraction computerdom.  This will continue to severely restrict
the gnucash developer base.  The number of potential contributers should be a
part of your considerations on future code evolution.  Judging from the 
mailing list, 2-3 people currently carry a very large fraction of the load,
which prompts both accolades for their dedication and worries for the future.