Timeline for Using "iff" in documentation
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 23, 2024 at 15:02 | comment | added | Owen Reynolds | @DawoodibnKareem I don't use Java so had to look it up. The first thing I found on was on stackoverflow: stackoverflow.com/questions/3607641/…. You can downvote the top answer and leave a comment (it says to use normal comments for anyone maintaining the class and javadoc to explain the public-facing part). | |
| Nov 23, 2024 at 4:11 | comment | added | Dawood ibn Kareem | No, I don't think your last paragraph deals with this at all. The consumers of Javadoc comments are other developers. So if you want to explain something to other developers, it's appropriate to use a Javadoc comment. The exception would be if you're producing an API for use outside your company, and you want to keep some aspects of the implementation secret. I would never dream of using the <=> in any kind of internal documentation; or the abbreviation iff for that matter. | |
| Nov 22, 2024 at 3:39 | comment | added | Owen Reynolds | @DawoodibnKareem You don't think my last paragraph addresses this? Javadoc is for user-facing comments, while I felt my example of a rare time I'd use an IFF (which I prefer to write as <=>) was clearly an "internal" developer comment, explaining how something works. But if you're not seeing that I can try to clear it up. | |
| Nov 21, 2024 at 22:09 | comment | added | Dawood ibn Kareem | I can see this working out very badly in things like Javadoc comments, which are (approximately) HTML. | |
| Nov 21, 2024 at 18:33 | comment | added | Owen Reynolds | @DewiMorgan Ah! You think I'm one of those naive folks who "helpfully" propose a solution they just made up! You think I hastily misread a Wikipedia article. No. I learned <=> in the same computer logic class I learned IFF, and have seen it since used interchangeably. I assure you that if you make truth tables, IFF and <=> work out to be identical. | |
| Nov 21, 2024 at 3:30 | comment | added | Dewi Morgan | But the spaceship operator doesn't ever mean iff in computing contexts, so far as I can tell. It means "3-way comparison", or "null-safe comparison"; a comparator, not a conditional operator. Your line "It's a real logic symbol, which officially means the same thing as IFF" does not appear to be correct, or at least, your link does not seem to support the claim you're making that it's ever used or understood to mean "IFF" by anyone other than yourself. | |
| Nov 20, 2024 at 16:14 | history | edited | Owen Reynolds | CC BY-SA 4.0 | clarified I was not unsuccessfully attempting to use mark-up |
| Nov 20, 2024 at 16:03 | comment | added | Owen Reynolds | A reader could think I meant to suggest the single-character double-arrow symbol. I can fix that. Thanks. | |
| Nov 20, 2024 at 3:02 | comment | added | Dewi Morgan | While the 3-character "spaceship operator" sequence "<=>" looks similar to "⇔", it's heavily overridden in computing contexts. It means "three way comparison" in several programming languages, or "null-safe equality check" in SQL dialects. Math markup in prose is generally an anti-pattern, as symbol sequences are typically opaque to the non-cognoscenti: so "iff" is trivially searchable, but "⇔" is not. Overall, I'd consider "iff" far more likely to be unambiguous and colloquially known to those reading an English computer manual, but I'd recommend "if and only if" for most cases. | |
| Nov 20, 2024 at 0:53 | history | answered | Owen Reynolds | CC BY-SA 4.0 |