What I was taking exception to was the opening line of “Don’t do this. Do this” equivocating statements like:

disjunction (V)

if(p) true else q
p || q

Which I incorrectly read as an equivalence between these statements, which isn’t strictly true in most programming languages. My post was an argument against golf programming — wherein if p or q are anything but boolean values, you begin returning objects which can be acted upon, which to me is obfuscated.

p || q more correctly maps (in many languages, as far as I can recall) to: if (p) p else q

So, in an obfuscated way, you could write something like:

var = (p || q)

Instead of:

if ( p ) var = p else var = q

Which is semantically clearer. Again, sorry for the dickish post. Hope this makes it clearer.

In each entry, is an italicised if/else construct on the first line. One the second line is a correction and “less obfuscated” expression that is equivalent. On the third line is the same expression written using denotational semantics. Each entry has a name that derives from first-order logic.

How can be it be so complicated?

Aside from the entries that return purely true or false, this is a wonderfully obfuscated way to program. Returning values from a logical construct might work, but it’s a worthless way to communicate a concept.

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