Going with option 1b from the issue: calculated and asserted amounts
are compared exactly, disregarding display precision.
But now balance assertion failure messages show those exact amounts at
full precision, avoiding confusion.
Surprisingly, balance assertions were checking to maximum precision,
which meant it was possible, with a display-precision-limiting
commodity directive, to have a failing assertion with the error
message showing asserted and actual amounts that looked the same.
Now we round the calculated account balance (but not the asserted
balance) to display precision before comparing. This should ensure
assertions always behave as you would expect from visual inspection.
A bunch of account sorting changes that got intermingled.
First, account codes have been dropped. They can still be parsed and
will be ignored, for now. I don't know if anyone used them.
Instead, account display order is now controlled by the order of account
directives, if any. From the mail list:
I'd like to drop account codes, introduced in hledger 1.9 to control
the display order of accounts. In my experience,
- they are tedious to maintain
- they duplicate/compete with the natural tendency to arrange account
directives to match your mental chart of accounts
- they duplicate/compete with the tree structure created by account
names
and it gets worse if you think about using them more extensively,
eg to classify accounts by type.
Instead, I plan to just let the position (parse order) of account
directives determine the display order of those declared accounts.
Undeclared accounts will be displayed after declared accounts,
sorted alphabetically as usual.
Second, the various account sorting modes have been implemented more
widely and more correctly. All sorting modes (alphabetically, by account
declaration, by amount) should now work correctly in almost all commands
and modes (non-tabular and tabular balance reports, tree and flat modes,
the accounts command). Sorting bugs have been fixed, eg #875.
Only the budget report (balance --budget) does not yet support sorting.
Comprehensive functional tests for sorting in the accounts and balance
commands have been added. If you are confused by some sorting behaviour,
studying these tests is recommended, as sorting gets tricky.
It's amazing how you can build, document, support and fix a thing for
years and not know what exactly it does. Directives are tricky.
Here is a pretty accurate description of their current behaviour,
determined by testing.
A commodity directive that doesn't specify the decimal point character
increases ambiguity and the chance of misparsing numbers, especially
as it overrides all style information inferred from the journal amounts.
In some cases it caused amounts with a decimal point to be parsed as if
with a digit group separator so 1.234 became 1234.
We could augment it with extra info from the journal amounts, when available,
but it would still be possible to be ambiguous, and that won't be obvious.
A commodity directive is what we recommend to nail down the style.
It seems the simple and really only way to do this reliably is to require
an explicit decimal point character. Most folks probably do this already.
Unfortunately, it makes another potential incompatiblity with ledger and
beancount journals. But the error message will be clear and easy to
work around.
