On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, comex wrote:
> '.-- but this suggests an
> organization of the Proposal Pool such that a proposal is just text
> ('foobar'); the Proposal Pool consists of a list of ordered pairs of
> (id number, proposal, ai, ii) and can contain duplicates of the same
> proposal. Such a layout makes the most ordinary-language sense but
> contradicts the assignment of AI, ID number, etc. directly to the
> proposal by the Rules.
What's contradictory about saying that the proposal pool identifies
proposals with "act of creation" properties (published text, publisher,
publication date, message ID, and if necessary section of message) which
are legally sufficient to distinguish any two acts of creation as per
R106p2? Note that none of these can change (contents of a message or
part of a message, and publisher of that message, and the message ID/
datestamp etc.). These make three fundamental properties of Proposals:
Proposer, text, and message-ID/message section, governed by our rules
on fora and publications and not subject to change, as the unique
identifiers. (AI, etc., are not so - you are not required to specify
them to create a proposal).
So perhaps the right analogy is not "proposal = contract document
(subject to change)" but "proposal =published message document
(not subject to change)". The link is made pretty strongly in R106p2,
in any case.
It fits in with the "becomes" part of R106p2, and avoids the
difficulty of assuming an infinite number of unpublished proposals
"exist" (as the interpretation that "anything that fits R106p1 is a
proposal" would suggest).
-goethe
