Commodity vs currency

[Martin Michlmayr]

I believe I read that beancount uses "commodity" and "currency"
interchangeably.

But then I see:

'COMMODITY_META(str)': Get the metadata dict of the commodity directive of the currency.

'CURRENCY(Amount)': Extract the currency from an Amount.

Why are different terms used?

--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/

[Martin Blais]

Yes, the terms have been used interchangeably, I believe, as in Ledger (historical reasons).

There's no particular reason.

Perhaps in the very beginning it wasn't clear whether those two subsets of "commodities" should be differentiated (they don't have to).

In the source code I'm /mostly/ using "currency" but it's not a nice choice, as it's not common usage for other types of commodities, e.g. stocks.

I should use "commodity" everywhere, at least in the shell and in the docs.

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[Martin Blais]

Actually, if I remember now, the term "commodity" was intended to be used for currencies which have at least one instance of being held at cost.

In practice this distinction never made a difference and we can treat those interchangeably.

[Martin Blais]

Here, I added aliases, you can use either:

https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/commits/217359e73290e957b7f36ad370e8005771f4b7d2

(In the next version of the shell, I'll clean up all the function list, the next shell version will be a major shakeup, beyond Beancount. I'll fork out the shell so it can work on other (non-Beancount) datasets, and applying it to Beancount will provide virtual tables per directive type, e.g., SELECT ... FROM transactions ...., SELECT ... FROM price ...., etc. The current shell version was always intended to be experimental - it's fairly undertested - the purpose was to find out what people find necessary and I've already been had a very liberal attitude about adding new stuff to it. Its list of functions and design is therefore somewhat less than ideal.)

[Martin Michlmayr]

* Martin Blais <bl...@furius.ca> [2018-03-22 20:10]:

> Actually, if I remember now, the term "commodity" was intended to be used
> for currencies which have at least one instance of being held at cost.

That actually makes a lot of sense to me.

> In practice this distinction never made a difference and we can treat those
> interchangeably.