Re: current A.6 draft

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 11:32:07PM +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
> It offends my aesthetic senses as a programmer.  ;-)
>
> Rewriting it as
> 
> >>>           e. If a majority of n:m is required for A, and B is the default
> >>>              option, N(B,A) is (n/m).  In all other cases, N(B,A) is 1.
> 
> doesn't look any more verbose to me.

True.  It's more complicated but it's not really all that much more
verbose.

Focussing on aesthetics: right now the only two supermajority ratios
possible are 2:1 and 3:1 -- the numbers 2 and 3 are easy to represent.
Asking for something more general, without specifying what that more
general thing is going to solve, invites all sort of complexity having
to do with the [non-existant] possibilities.

Is there another reason for introducing that complexity?

As an aside: the code I wrote to test this implementation uses an array
of integers to keep track of supermajority and the default option.
Currently, each vote can have a 0 (default), 1 (normal majority), 2 (2:1
supermajority) or 3 (3:1 supermajority).  You seem to be suggesting that I
use floats for this array rather than integers, and I'd like to understand
why floats are better in this context.  If it's because floats are more
aesthetically pleasing, then I'd like to know why they're more pleasing.

Thanks,

-- 
Raul