On Sat, 08 Jul 2000, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> One of the big issues seems to be whether we have just one denominator
> for a commodity, or many.
> Let each commodity to have its own common denominator, but change this
> denominator when new transactions make it necessary. The new denominator
> be a multiple of the old one. Changing a denominator involves
> retroactively rewrite all existing transactions that involved that
> denominator.
Although this is functional, I object to re-denomination because the auditors
want the ledger to match the original transaction documents.
Once an entry is properly entered, that entry should never change.
> Actually, a problem that none of the proposals in this mailing list
> addresses is the possibility that a commodity mught be bought and
> sold in units whose conversion factors are irrational.
As I said before, you can have irrational pricing but not irrational prices.
The ledgers represent inventories. Inventories can be counted.
Prices are exchange ratios. You trade items in one inventory for items in a
different inventory. As such, field theory tells us that we will never have
to deal with values that cannot be mapped onto the rational numbers.
> Can you, for example buy angles in degrees and sell them in radians?
<humor>
Well, I won't "buy" that angle.
Where did you buy your degree?
Radian's already been sold.
</humor>
For those of you outside the Silicon Hills, Radian Corp was a spinoff of
Tracor, Inc. here in Austin. They are a leader in environmental monitoring
and similar engineering.
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