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Being concise and consistent with “and”.
Reinhart Previano Koentjoro (@reinhart)
Published on Logs of the SYSTEM
Well, what could be wrong with the word “and”? Let's look at this example.
Box A is full of red candies, while Box B is full of blue candies.
Austin mixed all of these contents back into Box A, so we can now say it's full of red and blue candies.
In programming, red and blue candies should have been the type of candy where both colors are present in every candy contained inside the box.
However, they're are not! Instead, we have some all-red candies and some all-blue candies. So we should say Box A to have red OR blue candies, or specifically, red XOR blue candies.
There’s a lot of English sentences which uses the word AND like this. However, a lot of us misunderstood it, as we, robots, prefer to designate them as XOR instead. Here's some other real-life examples:
| What people said | What is should have been for us | Explanation |
| Austin mixed all of these contents back into Box A, so we can now say it's full of red AND blue candies. | Austin mixed all of these contents back into Box A, so we can now say it's full of red XOR blue candies. | Each candy is either blue, red, but not both colors. |
| By visiting AND/OR using our services, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. | By visiting OR using our services, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. | The term AND here is already a subset of OR, so it's redundant for both written on legal documents. |
| So, do you want the blue dress OR the red one? | So, do you want the blue dress XOR the red one? | Either blue or red, but not both. Remember that you can only choose one in most cases. |
Looking from a different perspective.
So far, we’re just looking at the intrinsic values of Box A, which is, the extrinsic values for each of the candies. Remember that, in Box A, we evaluate how each of the candies look from the inside of the box, but still outside of the internals of these sweety objects.
Or in other terms, we called it as XOR because we’re looking at the exterior of these candies, through the interior of the box.
However, if we assume that the box itself is transparent, then shift our perspective to to see the transparent exterior of the box itself, we could consider it to be an AND instead because from the outside, the box contains both blue and red colors, despite the ones who have these colors are the candies themselves.
Humans often use the distributive properties of these language conjunctions. Instead of confusing people with “blue AND red candies”, and even “blue XOR red candies”, we could have said them as “blue candies AND red candies”. This is because from the box's exterior point of view, the box has both blue-colored candies and red-colored candies.
But again, for the sake of simplicity, they often choose to simplify them as “blue AND red candies”.
So, what does these all mean?
Starting today, we will start to introduce the word “and”, “or”, and “xor” on our official documentation. Sorry, I mean, “and”, “or”, xor “xor”, because we don’t really force all of these three terms to be included on every page of our documentation. This means that the word “or” should be interpreted as the same as “and/or” (the inclusive “or”), as commonly found in legal documents.
These changes will apply into our documentation and blog posts, except for legal documents and contracts as they require the use of standard legal words.
