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Re: iff?


From: thi
Subject: Re: iff?
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 02:09:05 -0700

   From: Masao Uebayashi <address@hidden>
   Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 13:06:56 +0900

   I wonder why there're so many 'iff' in the documents.  Do they have
   any special meaning?  Am I missing anything???

"iff" is an elided form of "if and only if".  a quick grep through
guile-core/doc texi files shows about 90 instances, a large number
having the form: "Return #t iff OBJ is of type FOO.", i.e., documenting
type predicates.  for these cases, using "iff" instead of "if" removes
possible ambiguity of type inheritence and explicitly re-enforces the
disjointness property.  using "iff" for type predicates in this way
seems to be standard accepted practice.

the other cases i didn't look at closely, but i suspect their usage is
in similar spirit.

thi



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