It seems "A but B" means something like "A is technically true but the obvious implications thereof are somewhere between 'not true' and 'nearly true' because of B".
I can't not pull you up on defining "but" with a sentence involving "but" :-þ
I think the real point is that the distinction between 'and' and 'but' doesn't really have any effect on the meaning of a question – and all Boolean expressions in programming languages are implicitly questions posed to the computer ("is this complicated thing true or false?"). In a declarative statement, 'and' vs 'but' provides additional subtext along with the obvious propositional-logic value of the statement; for instance, if I say "This tastes cinnamony and yummy" versus "This tastes cinnamony but yummy", then on the face of it I'm making the same two assertions about the taste of the thing, but my choice of 'and'/'but' hints some extra information about whether I like cinnamon in general, or perhaps whether I'd have expected a cinnamony taste to go well in this particular context. Whereas if I ask "Does it taste cinnamony {and/but} yummy?", then the and/but distinction is still conveying an editorial comment from me, and the information I'm asking you to provide to me is more or less the same no matter which conjunction I picked.
So, put that way, perhaps we should permit 'but' in programming languages as a synonym for 'and' – and the distinction between the two functions purely as a comment to the reader :-)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-17 03:28 pm (UTC)I can't not pull you up on defining "but" with a sentence involving "but" :-þ
I think the real point is that the distinction between 'and' and 'but' doesn't really have any effect on the meaning of a question – and all Boolean expressions in programming languages are implicitly questions posed to the computer ("is this complicated thing true or false?"). In a declarative statement, 'and' vs 'but' provides additional subtext along with the obvious propositional-logic value of the statement; for instance, if I say "This tastes cinnamony and yummy" versus "This tastes cinnamony but yummy", then on the face of it I'm making the same two assertions about the taste of the thing, but my choice of 'and'/'but' hints some extra information about whether I like cinnamon in general, or perhaps whether I'd have expected a cinnamony taste to go well in this particular context. Whereas if I ask "Does it taste cinnamony {and/but} yummy?", then the and/but distinction is still conveying an editorial comment from me, and the information I'm asking you to provide to me is more or less the same no matter which conjunction I picked.
So, put that way, perhaps we should permit 'but' in programming languages as a synonym for 'and' – and the distinction between the two functions purely as a comment to the reader :-)