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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Inclusive or, I assume (from my limited understanding, Judaism considers some rules to only apply to Jews, so it would make sense to consider Jews and Gentiles separately here).

Total side note, but I’ve noticed that programmers (including myself) are more prone to read English or as xor than, for want of a better term, normal people. Not sure why this is.

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That's correct; I updated my original comment to mention that the Jewish laws of the sabbath aren't meant to apply to non-Jews (there is, however, a large and rather entertaining body of practical discussion of under what conditions, and how explicitly, one can ask a non-Jew to do things on the sabbath that would be forbidden for the asker themself to do).

> practical discussion of under what conditions, and how explicitly, one can ask a non-Jew to do things on the sabbath that would be forbidden for the asker themself to do

If I remember well, one option is "if someone were to do this job, he wouldn't regret it later" (as in he would be paid for that, but that can't be explicitly mentioned).

in practice, things that are biblibcally prohibited, one cannot ask a non jew to do. only things that are rabbinically prohibited would one be permitted to do (i.e. same people who prohibited, also created a backdoor to permit. I'd also note that in practice its a bit more complicated than this simplification).

Of course one then might get into a debate whether a particular action is rabbinically or bibilically prohibited.

> Total side note, but I’ve noticed that programmers (including myself) are more prone to read English or as xor than, for want of a better term, normal people. Not sure why this is.

The English terms 'or' and 'and' used in normal, non-mathematical speech are far closer to the set operations, not boolean propositional logic.

The set operations they refer to are of course context dependent. For example, in a question context, 'or' is asking for the selection of one set or another. In a statement context, it usually indicates that it refers to a member of either set, unless used with the qualifier 'either' in which case the statement once again requires the choice of one set or another.

That's interesting. My observation is almost the reverse — the casual English default for "or" seems to be xor, and only people with some exposure to formal logic know it can be ambiguous.

I find some reinforcement for that in almost every logic book I've ever read using the casual English parsing of "or" to introduce the notion of inclusive or. But it's been a while, I may be misremembering.

Yeah, maybe I misstated; 'normal people' are more likely to read English 'or' contextually (in this case, for instance, clearly it's not meant to mean that Jews aren't people), while programmers are more likely to treat it as 'must mean exclusive or' (maybe precisely because explicit inclusive or is introduced with reference to it).

I think it's or, which can look like xor because, e.g. (2|1)==(2^1);

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