Hopefully this is will do it. This restores the past behaviour:
- parsing prices in balance assertions/assignments
- ignoring them in assertions
- using them in assignments
- and printing them
and clarifies tests and docs.
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 different approach: instead of converting to unit prices and fiddling
with the display precision, just multiply the total prices by the same
multiplier (and keep them positive).
This seems a little more natural. I'm not sure if one of these will be
more robust than the other.
Transaction modifier multipliers have never multiplied total-priced amounts
correctly (and prior to hledger 1.10, this could generate unbalanced
transactions).
Now, the generated postings in this situation will have unit prices,
and an extra digit of display precision. This helps ensure that
the modified transaction will remain balanced. I'm not sure yet if
it's guaranteed.
These commands now detect the account types declared by account directives.
Whenever such declarations are not present, built-in regular expressions
are used, as before.
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.
Inferred amounts now have the appropriate standard amount style applied.
And when checking for balanced transactions, amount styles declared with
commodity directives are also used (previously only inferred amount styles were).
