ternary operator vote

[Bengt Richter]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003 15:45:14 -0800, Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote:

>Bengt Richter wrote:
>
>> B: +0
>> C: -0  # actual opinion, no way to express
>
>Indeed, and I'm not sure how the difference between +0 and -0 (which I
>presume are "don't care, but inclined to approve" and "don't care, but
>inclined to disapprove") could ever be tallied in a meaningful way. 
>They're both "don't cares."
You could just present the counts and let the BDFL use them to make his
decision ;-)

>
>> D: -1  # ditto
>> no change: +1 means what?
>
>I think you missed his whole point.  He was suggesting a voting process
No, I think I understood, and you missed my point ;-)

>something like this:
>
>A: no change
>B: if C: x else: y
>C: x if C else y
>D: C ? x ! y
>E: C ?? x !! y
>[and so on]
>
>That is, there are many alternatives, one of them is "no change."  When
>people submit their vote, they can submit as many alternatives as they
>wish.  Then you simply tally the results.  This has the benefit of
>allowing people to express opinions like, "Well, I'd be willing to
>accept any of these three syntaxes" or "Well, I really don't think it's
>necessary, but if it's going to get admitted, I'd want _this_ syntax."
>
But you can't express an opinion that says, "I'm willing to accept
C or D or no change, but I am dead set against B." If you just use
a value of 0 for B, it looks like you may be indifferent to B and
like C, D, and no change equally well.

BTW, we could vote by just posting to a special voting
thread with some formatted lines from an official template like

PEP_308_VOTE:
[+0] A: no change
[-1] B: if C: x else: y
[-1] C: x if C else y
[+0] D: C ? x ! y
[+1] E: C ?? x !! y
[+1] F: C -> x -> y
[+1] G: C and x else y
[  ] [and so on]

End it with a blank line, and it would be easy to write a script to extract
voter id from the header and find the PEP_308_VOTE: block, and tally the results.
It wouldn't be a secret ballot, but here I wouldn't think that would matter.

Actually, I'd like to be able to weight E, F, and G differently. Perhaps
we could have three columns for different voting marks, the first for pure
approval 0/1 style, the second for {-1,-0,+0,+1} and another for +-cents
of a total voting budget of one voting dollar per choice.

At least we'd get some objective data on how people would use the various
ways of expressing their feelings.

Regards,
Bengt Richter