PEP 285: Adding a bool type

[John Roth]

"Andrew Dalke" <dalke at dalkescientific.com> wrote in message
news:a8pqkh$492$1 at slb1.atl.mindspring.net...
> John Roth wrote:
> >People who were using bools for your Democrat or Republican
> >example were simply using them incorrectly. In most states, there
> >were way more than two choices: the Green party got enough votes
> >to throw the election to Bush. If he hadn't run, Gore would have
> >won!
>
> Just as an off-topic reminder.  The difference between Bush and
> Gore was less than 2,000.  Given the final Florida results of
>     Bush    2,909,176, Republican
>     Gore    2,907,451, Democrat
>     Nader      96,837, Green
>     Browne     18,856, Libertarian
>     Buchanan   17,356, Reform
>     Phillips    4,280, Official Constitution Party
>     Hagelin     2,287, Natural Law
>
> That means Hagelin, the *7th* place party, had enough votes to
> "throw the election to Bush."
>
>                     Andrew
>                     dalke at dalkescientific.com

Just as off-topic. I believe it was around half a million,
nationwide. US election laws are interestingly archaic,
and definitely off-topic,  however, the Green party
had enough votes in Florida to have won the odd
electoral seat if the electoral seats had been divided
by vote, not by winner take all.

Your comment about Hagelin is also incorrect. From
the name of the party, I would assume that all Hagelin
voters would have voted for Bush (or another right
wing candidate) if he had not run, so his presence would
have 'thrown the election to Gore,' or at least tended
that way by denying Bush votes.

The point, however, is that the original poster used
an example where there were only two parties as
her example of why boolean didn't work well, and then
added a typologically distinct third case (ballot spoiled
for a specific reason.)

My point was that it was a contrived example that had
no basis in reality (consequently, it's a good example
of bad design,) and the proposed extension was an
example of even worse design.

Claiming that a syntactic construct is bad on the basis
of bad designs is, frankly, a non-starter in my opinion.

John Roth
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