NOT.1:4.5 - Compare the work enabled and the work displaced

Compare candidate notations on the selected operations under comparable conditions. Look for a practical trade-off: a shared definition may make one update cheap while requiring the reader to follow references; expanded expressions may be easy to read locally while repeating changes in several places.

Keep both alternatives when they serve different necessary operations and the correspondence between them can be maintained. NOT.6 develops that arrangement. For a choice among alternatives, compare only characteristics that affect the work and state the selection criterion. A simple contrast can settle the local choice: one notation loses an answer that the other preserves.

When the comparison must be reused across alternatives or design iterations, A.19.CPM governs comparison under a declared comparator; A.19.SelectorMechanism governs selecting a set from those results under stated criteria. A Pareto criterion can retain alternatives that are not dominated on the chosen characteristics. It does not by itself resolve a trade-off between reading and editing effort. Keep that trade-off visible until the work supplies a reason to choose, or retain both notations for their different uses. A vocabulary of design trade-offs can help notice a difficulty, but a vocabulary or weighted checklist cannot establish that a user can perform the operation.

Trying a candidate can reveal that the original question was incomplete. Revise the selected operations or cases when the newly visible distinction changes a useful next move. Then test the affected requirement again. This is a development of the problem and its proposed solution, for which C.40.CD supplies the common method.