Python Programming On Win32

Doubletalk

The example application is a slimmed-down version of a set of tools developed by one of the authors over the last few years. The toolkit is intended to be a language for double-entry bookkeeping , hence the name DoubleTalk. The original intention, many years ago, was to develop a language for dealing with financial objects, in which users could express and solve a variety of financial problems. An absolute requirement is for end users to be able to work interactively and compile and run their own scripts. Python took away the need to create a whole new language; all that is needed is a class library.

We believe this general approach has great benefits in other fields. If you can build a class library to capture the essence of some problem domain and expose those classes to users in an easy-to-use environment like Python, you give them the ability to create new applications for themselves.

Warning

Since this is an example in a book and not a commercial product, let’s clearly state our “quality objective.” We want a simple class library that lets a careful user write scripts to manipulate financial data. We aren’t creating a production-quality application that checks everything and saves the user from all possible mistakes, and there will be a number of shortcuts and hacks a production application would not take; we’ll point these out as we go.

The core of the library is a pair of classes, Transaction and BookSet , which aim to capture the essence of a set of accounts. They ...