Issue #388: Are unknown lines ignored or do they produce erros (blais/beancount)

[Martin Michlmayr]

New issue 388: Are unknown lines ignored or do they produce erros
https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/issues/388/are-unknown-lines-ignored-or-do-they

Martin Michlmayr:

Jonathan Corbet reviewed [beancount on LWN](https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/785553/39167e23980e7e4c/):

"It is also worth noting that beancount explicitly ignores any lines in the file that it doesn't recognize. The apparent purpose of this feature is to allow other types of markup in the file; the ability to manage it with the Emacs Org mode is said to be especially gratifying. But this behavior can also make it easy for mistakes to pass unnoticed. Similar behavior in cron has led to security vulnerabilities in the past. Your editor would feel much better knowing that a corrupted beancount file would not escape notice."

I wondered if that's true and Jonathan [referred to the manual](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAMVrKIA2qtRGmoVDSUBJGmYZSygUaR0uOMW1GV3YE0/edit#heading=h.9zjhwskw53j8) which says "Any line that does not begin as a valid Beancount syntax directive (e.g. with a date) is silently ignored".

It seems like the manual is wrong because:

echo foo > x
bean-check x
..../x:1: Invalid token: 'foo'

Can you clarify, and if necessary, update the manual?

FWIW, beancount's syntax is stricter in many ways and I agree with Jonathan that anything unknown should result in an error.