In this document, "or" is being used according to the fifth definition listed by the Oxford Learner's Dictionaries:
used to introduce a word or phrase that explains or means the same as
another
geology, or the science of the earth’s crust
It weighs a kilo, or just over two pounds....
Though it's not a bad answer, it has received 40 up-votes.
Tardigrades can survive vacuum, low temperatures, and moderate radiation for quite a while. They're multicelled organisms. How tough is the toughest hypothetically viable single-celled extremophile? How sure are you that we've found all of them on Earth already?
It's a matter of caution. Contami...
On one hand, I know that some people do have a real problem with this kind of word or phrase (the "or" one) in their own languages. On the other hand, it's a bit sad.
(As a mock-up question: "I know that 'I' means 'I', 'myself'. But yesterday I saw a character in a TV series use 'I' when it was clearly that she meant another person. Why did she use 'I' instead of 'she' or 'her'?")
I kinda agree that the question is not really about Perl, though the confusion is clearly in the context of Perl (or math or programming). I also think it's not really about English. It's cross-language.
In this document, "or" is being used according to the fifth definition listed by the Oxford Learner's Dictionaries:
used to introduce a word or phrase that explains or means the same as
another
geology, or the science of the earth’s crust
It weighs a kilo, or just over two pounds....
@DamkerngT. I don't think either of those fits, although the current mathematics is not helpful either. I am really not sure any existing tag clearly expresses the problem in a way that doesn't presume the answer.
@jimsug I very much doubt it. I mean, I can't imagine someone haven't heard of a similar expression with or in their own language in their math classes.
Part of it is certainly because or has a specific meaning in programming languages. Or rather, it has a meaning in English that isn't used in programming languages.
@NathanTuggy Probably not quite like that, or if it was related to that it was probably almost a thousand years ago, before the land of Siam came to exist.
We can say these two sentences.
He is a better person than him.
Person better than him should behave excellently.
My question is, can we swap them like this?
He is a person better than him.
Better person than him should behave excellently.
I think sentence 4 is wrong...
The words now and snow have never rhymed in the history of English. Both of them are native English words; they did not come into English from Dutch or German. (Rather, English, Dutch and German all descend from a common ancestor, Proto-Germanic; that is why these three languages have similar wor...
And they say questions don't get good answers after five years.
The OP originally asked, "Why does "or" mean "=" in Mathematics?" (or something very similar). That is the issue I addressed. My point was precisely that the meanings in Mathematics have nothing to do with the meanings in everyday informal settings. There is, of course, the other issue he raised, namely, "what do the statements in the manual mean?". I did not address that issue. — David Carraher7 hours ago
@tchrist I just shouldn't have brought it up. Anyway. Back to the matter at hand.
@DamkerngT. Yeah, this is true. But I think part of the problem is that 1) the OP asked a mathematics question on an English site and 2) the answerer answered the question from a mathematical stance rather than an English one, on an English site.
Eg on Law we get lots of questions that could be answered with common sense instead of legal principles, but that doesn't mean they should be.
@jimsug (Although occasionally this will manifest in deeply unintuitive ways; on SO, software-rec questions are explicitly off-topic, but software-rec answers are perfectly fine and dandy.)
Almost never.
These paths have a place when two conditions exist:
There is a clearly-defined topic that is wholly inappropriate on one site and wholly appropriate on another.
That topic is asked about daily on the former site.
This is pretty rare. Especially if the first site isn't Stack Ove...
Yeah, I've read that whole nest of related recent migration questions (as far as I know, I've got everything), but it does seem the "migration" perk is not long for this world.
Stack Exchange releases "data dumps" of all its publicly available content roughly every three months via archive.org, and also makes that information queryable over the Internet at the Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE). Over time, as new features and other bits of data are introduced to Stack ...
Is there a name for the phenomenon of an OP switching approval from one answer to another?
(I am not saying or asking whether, or when, this might be a good idea)
Is there a badge for writing [a certain number of] answers, after someone else's answer has been accepted, and then the OP switches...
SAT tests are produced by idiots who know nothing about language and try to make language conform to the irregularities of their own ideas. Very importantly for any language learner taking a SAT test, you need to understand that these tests are not designed for language learners. They are designe...
Source: The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie
As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way. We hope that this book will help you to learn C and to use it...
At the time, no one else was interested in writing a canonical post, so the initiative sort of dried up... I'd love to start it back up again. Would you be interested in writing one? — WendiKidd ♦1 min ago
@Wendi I occasionally see Stoney in chat saying that they didn't reach a consensus. Of course I'd love to help, but I don't think I have what it takes to write one. Of course, we could make a team or something, and arrange it. It could be a weird new meta post, or just a friendly campfire in chat. — inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M1 min ago
@StoneyB, or any other Westpondians round here. Could you give me some style / grammaticality judgements on the examples in this post here , by any chance? If you could also check out the comments, I'd be very interested in your feedback.
@Araucaria My feedback's pretty useless, cuz my own written dialect is essentially mid-ocean (and in any case if it wuz me I'd rewrite the sentence to eliminate the collision of conflicting notions of concord). I do fret that you use the question as a springboard to a critique of testwriting without lingering long enough to explain that concord is a real grammatical phenomenon, however wonky the edge cases.
If he does some special things, what should the sentence look like?
What does so special he do?
or
What so special does he do?
or maybe
What's so special he does?
I have an ELL question; but the Stack Exchange format obliges me to write a title not shorter than 15 characters and not longer than 150 characters.
So, how do I write a good title?
"And yes, I'd certainly answer that way to my ex teacher and trust me, here, they'll still like my answer!" This is interesting. I think I was wrong about thinking that teachers could raise formality in your dialect. As for me, I always feel that replying my teachers with "Same here." (with or without "Thank you."), as you suggest, is quite impolite. — Damkerng T.Jan 5 at 5:30
Honestly texting is so 2014 yesterday's news but in a age of Ebonics and slang terms short texting and other forms of playful attitudes I would have to say that no matter how you word you context the person interpreting it may see a attitude where there was not on and so on and so forth .