[EM] Craig: I did include ballot-counting code

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Craig Carey said:

What the blazes ?: OSSIPOFF's Python code couldn't even accept ballot paper
counts as input. That is what I saw at the Piaelli website.

I reply:

  Very good point. I agree that it didn't make sense for the Python listing 
to not have code for receiving and counting rankings. The Python code that 
I'd written, and Russ had it in its final debugged version, received and 
counted the raw input to get the pairwise vote totals.

  I wanted the program to be usable by anyone who wanted to copy it, and I 
wanted it to be complete and self-contained. So I included code to receive 
the rankings from a keyboard, and, from those rankings, to determine the 
pairwise vote totals, and use those to determine the winner.

  Russ passionately insisted no one would want to enter rankings from the 
kekyboard. One could ask, then, if he thought that people would rather 
determine the pairwise vote totals without any assistance from a computer 
program.

Sure, for a user who writes programs, that user can write his own 
ranking-receiving and counting program. But I wanted the program to be 
accessible to people who weren't inclined to write their own input code. No 
such luck. Russ left out the keyboard input and count code, leaving a 
program that had the pairwise vote totals as its inputs--inputs to be 
obtained by the user however s/he manages to.

Of course someone who wants to write their own input code could disregard 
the keyboard-input code.

  By the way, the code to receive the rankings from a keyboard and count 
them to find the pairwise vote totals was considerably longer than the part 
that uses those pairwise vote totals for the BeatpathWinner algorithm. 
That's because, for practical use, it's necessary to give the user a way to 
correct any keyboard-input errors that s/he makes, and to indicate when s/he 
has completed each ranking, and when s/he has entered all the rankings. That 
makes the code considerably longer.

ike Ossipoff

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