Promptness

[E. Dean Tribble]

We've been using a way to characterize operational notions such as
"promptness" and "fairness" that maks them much easier to think about. 
Rather than trying to be precise about what is actually possible to
guarantee, be precise about what the goal is, and then declare that systems
are "expected" to achieve it.  Thus, hashes for objects in an OO language
are required to be the same for objects which are equal, but "expected" to
be different for non-equal objects.

Fairness, for example, is not actually a very useful guarantee (eventually
might mean 100 years), so we instead "expect" processes to make regular
progress (well we can be a little more precise than that...).

Can you characterize "promptness" is these terms?  Has anyone heard similar
ideas?

dean