Establishing Accounting Principles as Invariants of Financial Systems
Naftaly H. Minsky · 2002
An enterprise that uses evolving software is susceptible to destructive and even disastrous effects caused either by inadvertent errors, or by malicious attacks by the programmers employed to maintain this software. It is my thesis that these perils of evolving software can often be tamed by ensuring that suitable overarching principles are maintained as invariants of the evolution of a given software system. In particular, it would be invaluable to ensure that a financial system satisfies the accounting principle of double-entry bookkeeping, throughout its evolutionary lifetime. We define a concept of evolution-invariant , discuss its usefulness, and show how the above mentioned accounting principles can be established as such invariants.