eTamil.in A FinTech DSL

Project

About eTamil and its author

eTamil is designed and built by Esan Maruff, PhD scholar at B.S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai.

Esan Maruff EM

Esan Maruff

இசன் மாருப் · also published as Mohammed Maruff
PhD Scholar, Department of Computer Applications
School of Computer Information and Mathematical Sciences
B.S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science and Technology
Vandalur, Chennai — 600048, Tamil Nadu, India

github.com/Maruff · [email protected]

Why eTamil exists

India’s financial system runs on rules — GST across states, income tax slabs, TDS, RBI circulars on payments and KYC, e-way bills under the Customs Act, audit trails under the Companies Act. Every one of those has to be re-expressed, by hand, in a general-purpose language before software can act on it. That work is repetitive, easy to get subtly wrong, and invisible until an assessment goes badly.

Meanwhile the people who understand those rules best — accountants, auditors, finance professionals across Tamil Nadu and beyond — are often kept out of writing them down, because the tools assume English and assume a programmer.

eTamil is an attempt at both problems at once: put the domain in the language, and put the language in Tamil.

The two commitments

Money is exact. Every number is a fixed-point decimal. There is no f64 in the arithmetic path, so 0.1 + 0.2 is exactly 0.3 and two amounts a fraction of a paisa apart are never mistaken for each other.

The libraries are written in eTamil. The standard library and the entire accounting framework are eTamil source, not Rust. If they needed a systems language, the DSL would not be sufficient for the thing it exists to do. The host provides only what a language cannot express — decimal arithmetic, text measurement, file and socket access — and everything above that is readable and editable by the people who use it.

Honesty about scope

The research describes eTamil through five phases, ending in policy engagement with the MCA, RBI and GSTN. The compiler is mid-Phase 1.

The status page is a feature-by-feature account of what runs, what is partial, and what is not built. Anything unimplemented fails with an explicit message rather than quietly doing nothing — a silent no-op in a tax calculator is worse than an error.

Get involved

The most useful contributions right now are database transactions and multi-connection support, verifying the MySQL driver against a live server, and a money type that carries a currency.

Licence

eTamil is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later).

The AGPL rather than the GPL is deliberate. eTamil is a backend language: the normal way to use it is to run it as a network service, and under a plain GPL that would not count as distribution — a hosted fork could diverge indefinitely without anyone downstream ever seeing the changes. The AGPL closes that gap, so anyone running a modified eTamil as a service has to offer those modifications to the people using it.

Acknowledgement

The research is supervised by Dr. S. P. Valli, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at B.S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science and Technology, and co-author of the paper.

The accounting framework is modelled on ekmungai/eloquent-ifrs.