This isn't actual software, it was just me looking at a pile of Beancount / Ledger files I've made over the years and thinking, "what if this was just a DSL on top of Guile?"
And then I also thought: "what if instead of making a custom DSL, we just used Wisp?" Here's I think how you might write an entry: * 2020 03 30 "Starting balance" Assets:Retirement:IRA : USD 1321 84 Equity:OpeningBalance Which would translate to: (* 2020 03 30 "Starting balance" (Assets:Retirement:IRA (USD 1321 84)) (Equity:OpeningBalance)) If we wanted to make it look like Ledger/Beancount, it would look more like: 2020-03-30 * "Starting balance" Assets:Retirement:IRA 1321.84 USD Equity:OpeningBalance Actually, that's both valid Wisp and Beancount! You could parse this as: (2020-03-30 * "Starting balance" (Assets:Retirement:IRA (USD 1321.84)) (Equity:OpeningBalance)) Except... IEEE floating point numbers aren't great for financial things, so hence me thinking maybe you'd separate them (even though it looks very yucky). And I thought it would be nicer if the first thing was the constructor, and I figured I might make the dates separate fields, but you could switch most of these out in post-processing (with some risks over the floating point stuff... notably risks Ledger also takes, infamously). Here's another example of Beancount syntax for asserting a balance: 2020-01-03 balance Assets:Banking:Checking 7337.43 USD Yeah anyway you could read that in Wisp too. As for special fields, eg check numbers, keywords could work: * 2020 01 03 "Tangled Woodworking" "" #:check 1835 #:invoice 2853 Assets:Banking:Checking : USD -4075.00 Expenses:House:RepairsImprovements (* 2020 01 03 "Tangled Woodworking" "" (#:check 1835) (#:invoice 2853) (Assets:Banking:Checking (USD -4075.00)) (Expenses:House:RepairsImprovements)) or * 2020 01 03 "Tangled Woodworking" "" . #:check 1835 . #:invoice 2853 Assets:Banking:Checking : USD -4075.00 Expenses:House:RepairsImprovements (* 2020 01 03 "Tangled Woodworking" "" #:check 1835 #:invoice 2853 (Assets:Banking:Checking (USD -4075.00)) (Expenses:House:RepairsImprovements)) Those dots wouldn't be needed if Arne hadn't reversed agreeing with me that keywords should always be part of a previous expression without needing that dot foo ;) Anyway. Just a thought. I haven't written software for this. I have thought it could be nice to do my finances at the REPL though. :P Feel free to steal this idea, or not... - Christine
