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By the way... has or in English a different meaning than in code? I cringe every time I hear the and/or thing translated to Spanish, usually several times in a
by narag 7y ago
By the way... has or in English a different meaning than in code?
I cringe every time I hear the and/or thing translated to Spanish, usually several times in a row.
Not sure if it's the usual mistranslation or it's also idiotic in the original text.
- Thorrez 7y agoYes, "or" in English often is more similar to xor in code. For example if someone says "I want pizza or a burger", that person probably does not want both pizza and a burger for the same meal, whereas in programming an equivalent expression would be satisfied if both are true simultaneously. But "or" in English doesn't always mean xor in code. Sometimes it is the same as or in code.
- gugagore 7y agoThere's another way that or_English is different, as illustrated by this frustrating "joke": 1: do you think it's A or do you think it's not A? 2: yes (assigning a truth value to the or expression rather than indicating which or operand is true.)
- skissane 7y agoEnglish "or" is ambiguous between inclusive and exclusive meanings. Most of the time, the intended meaning is inferred based on context, but one can make it explicit by using phrases such as "but not both", "exactly one of", etc. There exist languages which lack this ambiguity. Latin has two different words for "or" – "vel" (inclusive) and "aut" (exclusive).
- malodyets 7y agoIt depends on the intonation: / = rising, \ = falling "Do you want /pizza or a \burger\?" = XOR "Do you want /pizza or a /burger/? = OR (as in programming) It can make a good (though well-worn) joke to answer the XOR version with "Yes."
- namelosw 7y agoIn most programming languages the boolean operation 'or' is actually 'xor'. But in type system the disjunction concept represents 'either', the concepts are more like how people refer to 'or'.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> In most programming languages the boolean operation 'or' is actually 'xor'. I can't think of any where that's true; logical “and” and “or” are usually exactly what they claim to be, and many languages implement both as short-circuiting operators, whereas XOR can't short circuit because you can never know the result without considering both arguments.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> has or in English a different meaning than in code? “Or” in English can mean either exclusive-or or inclusive-or (usually it means the latter), and/or is a means to specify inclusive-or without ambiguity (the parallel construct for exclusive-or is “X or Y, but not both”) used mostly in contexts where misconstruction can be exotics to the drafter of the text, such as contracts and formal policy documents. In code, the meaning is already unambiguous; in all languages I am aware, “or” or the symbol referred to in speech with that name (e.g., “||”) is strictly inclusive, and do there is an exclusive-or operator, it is different.