[bgribble]

I committed to the GnuCash codebase pretty regularly in the 1999-2002 era... I think maybe I actually implemented the fractional representation that the article discusses? Not sure, it was a long time ago! I definitely remember receiving some very heated emails about how this was total nonsense and there was no reason to do anything other than a decimal representation. The phrase "a superhighway of abstraction, leading nowhere" has stuck with me for lo these many years :) good times

[vitalikpie]

Thanks for the info! But did you guys thought about fractional commodities those days? Or was it clear that it is going away?

[bgribble]

I seem to remember that we were aware that fractional commodities were going away, but exact rational values would still be important to be able to represent historical holdings and transactions.

[vitalikpie]

In hindsight do you think it was an right decision or too "pure"?

[bgribble]

I guess I don't really have an opinion about that. Certainly an exact representation of decimal numbers was essential, and was something we needed to implement at the time, but going to a fully rational numeric stack was arguably overkill.

The current value of held assets in another currency isn't really "counting" any more, it's a prediction of the outcome of some future transaction that hasn't happened. So I'm less concerned about exactly computing it than I am in never making a mistake in assets that I am counting, i.e. keeping in one account and only incrementing and decrementing the amount when a transaction occurs.