I've seen it a couple of times and I keep marveling at the sheer strangeness of how it all played out.

The standard response to this is that laws should be written in ways that are non-ambiguous but that's easier said than done. Not to mention that sometimes the lawmakers can't fully agree themselves so they leave some statements intentionally ambiguous so that they can be interpreted by the courts.

Also, can you link to some good resources for someone who wants to get off the sidelines and get more involved in Chicago politics, whether the resources are on FB or elsewhere? I've previously tried Googling for some but with very limited success.

Thanks.

Also, there is a special place in hell for people who steal other people's lunches. That's one thing I could never understand. What's the thought process?!

1. The first pass (I think you call it the preprocessing step) is special in that it finds the maximum number and puts it in the first slot. The rest of the algorithm revolves around this max value (or at least I find it helpful to think of it that way). This is also the only time where j going above i makes any difference. After this pass we could stop the j loop when i == j but that would obviously complicate the code.

2. Second pass will always swap items in first and second slots since the first item is bigger than second (if they are equal, nothing happens). As noted in 1., j will keep going past i but it won't do anything since i is now pointing to the largest value in the array and the swap condition will never be met.

3. On third and all subsequent passes the value that a[i] is pointing to will be slotted in its right place in the sorted list that's being formed at the beginning of the array. This might require multiple swaps as j goes up and larger values go into the ith slot. Last thing that happens before j reaches i (so when j == i - 1) is always that the max value gets swapped from i-1 to i. This is basically what the second pass from 2. did.

4. The max value from 1. conceptually serves almost as a sentinel of sorts since it always represents the end of the list we've sorted so far and when j gets to i, it prevents the rest of j loop from doing anything. That's why the code can be so clean, without having to do any index arithmetic or short circuiting or any other complications. It's clean but definitely not simple, since it takes a while to wrap one's head around what's actually happening.

I am guessing the first requirement would be the deal breaker, but probably not in every case.