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Comments on Understanding "logical OR" and "logical AND" in programming languages

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Understanding "logical OR" and "logical AND" in programming languages

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Many programming languages either have keywords like or and and used for logic, or equivalent operators such as || or && - which are referred to as "logical or" and "logical and" respectively in the language documentation. However, these tools don't seem to work in a natural or expected way for many beginners. Which is to say: "translating" an English sentence into code, using or or || to represent the English word "or", etc., commonly causes errors or gives the wrong result.

Why is this? What are the semantics of these operators, and how is that different from a natural-language understanding? And why are they called "logical"? (Are there other kinds?)

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Meta (1 comment)
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Karl Knechtel‭ wrote 22 days ago

This question is intended as a language-agnostic catch-all for a simple class of logical errors, so that beginner questions can be duplicated to it in the future. In my experience, the large majority of questions along these lines are asked by new Python programmers, but in principle the question applies to many languages.

The specific focus here should be on the theoretical understanding of the logical flaw - it is not about details of what the correct syntax looks like (only a language-agnostic description), and it is especially not about other ways to solve underlying problems.