[Tutor] Lexicographic ordering (or something simpler)

[Matt Williams]

Dear All,

I'm trying to write something to calculate rule priorities, based on 
their provenance (ultimately I'm after a lexicographic ordering)

I have a set of terms (the provenances) I'm try to sort. I've done it by 
associating each possible set of terms with a dictionary, and then using 
the elements of the set as keys of the dictionary, so that it can look 
up the values. This is (almost certainly) sub-optimal, but ok for now....

Where I get stuck is that each rule is compared pairwise to each other; 
the precedence of the set of rules is then based on that. Since there 
can be ties between the rules, the result of each pairwise comparison 
for two rules a & ) is either 1,0 or -1, where 1 == a beats b, -1 == b 
beats a and 0 == tie.

At the moment I get back a list of results from testing one set of rules 
against the other. I now need to make a decision based on all the 
results. I've tried coding it as if...elif statements, but that all gets 
horrible.

Given a list of the form [1,0,0,1,-1] I need to make decision (in this, 
  it is undecided, so we drop down to the next criteria).

Any ideas/ pointers as to how I implement this?

Thanks,

Matt


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