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From: Kaz Kylheku <643-408-1753@kylheku.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Integral types and own type definitions (was Re: Suggested
 method for returning a string from a C program?)
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 17:58:24 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 2025-03-26, David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
> On 26/03/2025 10:59, Keith Thompson wrote:
>> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> writes:
>> [...]
>>> Sure.  But most people have forgotten such details long ago - negative
>>> numbers are not part of daily life (except as an indicator of how much
>>> you owe the bank...).  After all, negative numbers are not natural!
>> 
>> Most people understand credits and debits.
>
> They do.  But they understand it as "I owe the bank $100" - they don't 
> view it as "I have -$100 in my bank account".  Even when looking at 

They do if you have an overdraft. If you have a formal loan, then there
will be some positively running account representing it.

(At least in the English-speaking word, where we have debits and credits
which reverse polarity between asset versus liability type accounts.)

It would definitely make sense for a loan account to have a negative
balance which increases toward zero as it is paid off.

Then the value of your account portfolio in that bank could be
calculated simply by adding your accounts together.

Moreover, when you move money from some chequing account to the mortgage
account, it would be a transaction which contains values that add to
zero: Chequing account -300; loan account +300.  Otherwise it has to be:
Checquing account: debit 300; loan account credit 300. Which means that
a "credit" is subtractive to a loan account rather than additive.
Under this system, you never see a negative unless some account is
overdrawn.

I have an accounting system for self-employment activities which works
this way rather than the debit-credit system.

The debit credit system is confusing.

For mortgaging, I deal with a bank which gets something wrong on
statements: Would you believe it, they add together the value of the
checking account, and the mortgqge account, both being positive. Then
they call that the value of your account! E.g. if you have a $5,000
balance in the checquing account, and $50,000 in the mortgage account,
they call that a value of $55,000.  I wrote them an e-mail and they
acknowledged this, but nothing was done; typical bureaucracy.
They would not have made that mistake with -55,000 and 5,000.

-- 
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal
Mastodon: @Kazinator@mstdn.ca