✨ Use of var-args makes translation to other languages difficult

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Suggestion

There seems to be some inconsistent use of varargs in a few places that make the translation to other languages more difficult than it needs to be. The example I’ve come across is https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard-python/blob/main/src/electionguard/ballot.py#L757 which has the lines

        contest_hashes = [contest.crypto_hash for contest in self.contests]
        return hash_elems(self.object_id, encryption_seed, *contest_hashes)

Possible Implementation

The code above could easily just be simply

        contest_hashes = [contest.crypto_hash for contest in self.contests]
        return hash_elems(self.object_id, encryption_seed, contest_hashes)

which should achieve the same outcome but make translations easier when languages don’t have things like heterogeneous lists. In my Haskell implementation, hashes of multiple arguments of differerent are represented using the instances for various tuple types, so I can’t generate a tuple of arbitrary size at runtime.

Anything else?

No response

[keithrfung]

This is a great distinction to make for transliteration. Let’s leave this in triage but expand a bit more to denote all the lines where this is true.

[keithrfung]

This feature won’t be worked on despite the value of transliteration because we want to make sure the hashes are as flat as possible going for.