Talk:exclusive or

RFV discussion

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Used as a conjunction in running English text. 67.9.175.207 06:57, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

I would have thought these should both be nouns only. -- Visviva 07:08, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

If you are reading program code aloud, or dictating it, you would express something like if (x ^ y) as "if x exclusive-or y"; this would then be understood as a conjunction ("if x or y, but not both"). I can't imagine anybody using it in everyday English unless they were trying to be funny. Equinox 22:06, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

But in C, C++, Perl, etc., 1, 2, and 1 ^ 2 are all true values (since 1 ^ 2 == 3), so you can only use ^ as a logical exclusive-or if you know that both operands are using the same value (usually 1) for true. Granted, this is a common case, but I think it puts paid to the idea that read-aloud code uses "exclusive or" as a conjunction that joins two predicates, at least in these languages. In Java, ^ does double as a reliably-logical exclusive-or (because Java booleans are typesafe), but I still doubt that someone reading Java code aloud will really be distinguishing logical from bitwise disjunction, seeing as Java represents them the same way.

And anyway, I don't think I accept the idea that English renditions of source code have English parts of speech. What parts of speech are "open parenthesis" (or "left parenthesis"), "equal" (as in assignment in many languages), "star" (as in C/C++ pointers), and "cudder" (as in the right half of a Lisp cons)? We can frequently "round to the nearest" English part of speech, but they don't really behave like that.

—Ruakh_TALK 22:58, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I do agree with you, and I don't really want to see this term as a conjunction in Wiktionary; I don't think it's used that way in English. I was only trying to explain to per the original poster why someone might suggest it was a conjunction. (In answer to your value-for-true argument, though, this seems equivalent to other simpler "conjunctions" in code; if I ever say something like "saveClicked and hasUnsavedChanges", of course I'd mean it in a Boolean way and not as bitwise arithmetic.) Equinox 00:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, my point was that ^, unlike (say) && or ||, is bitwise arithmetic in most descendants of C, so if you're reading code in one of those languages, you wouldn't be using "exclusive or" in the way that our entry defines it. But anyway, if the original poster, Visviva, you, and I all agree that this isn't used as a conjunction in running English text, then this conversation seems pointless. (The original poster didn't explicitly say that it isn't, but (s)he RFV'd the claim that it is, which is certainly an expression of doubt.) So, let's just fix the entry. :-)   —Ruakh_TALK 01:08, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Rewritten as a noun entry with a usage note; please take a look. —Ruakh_TALK 01:36, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

The same issue applies to XOR, which, in the example sentence given for it under its conjuction sense at XOR, is used as a noun denoting an operation. --Dan Polansky 12:15, 6 January 2009 (UTC)