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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Because I've used it as an "or" symbol in a non unique common as muck manner since 1980 at least when I was taught Boolean logic in an undergraduate university mathematics class.

It's one of many conventional symbols for OR, more common in the pure ASCII days due to a lack of ∧ , ∨ , ¬ et al.

Which rock have you lived under that you've never seen it used an OR before?

People imposing their limited experience of the wide world upon others would certainly irk some, but rest easy, I've not taken offence at your odd assumption of non existent universal convention.

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This comment reeks of /r/iamverysmart.

> that can work for any app | browser | etc. on a network

That is an English clause, not a mathematical expression. You even have the abbreviated form of et cetera there.

> non existent universal convention

In English there is a convention for listing alternatives: commonly forward-slashes with no space between them, like 'this/that', or with commas and conjunctions, like 'this, or that'. Or make your life easy, and use some other collective noun such as 'platforms'.

> a lack of ∧ , ∨ , ¬ et al.

English convention dictates 'et al' (or et alia) be used to list authors or people, rather than inanimate objects. Or you could use a collective noun here, too: 'mathematical symbols'.

It'd make sense if you were writing out some Boolean expressions or trying to present something with formal logic. But you're writing English here so it seems inappropriate to a) ditch conventional grammar and b) pass off the criticism as "imposing their limited experience".

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To be fair, I've never seen it used in prose like that, and had trouble understanding your comment at first. I did university boolean logic 30 years ago and have been on the internet in programming communities nearly as long.

Sure, different groups have different conventions. I've been commenting on internet forums, threads, and groups since pre WWW Usenet, using | as OR (though more often as { A | B | C }, seen others use the same convention and this is the very first time anyone has ever claimed it as a unique quirk.

With braces or brackets it would have been immediately clear; I have seen that version.

Consider this the second time. ¿English motherfucker, do you write it?

I appreciate | as OR because (like its non-ascii cousin ∨) it uses an lr-symmetric glyph to denote a commutative operation.

EDIT: Backus uses the asymmetric overbarred "or" in 1959, but by 1963 the | we know and love has already taken its place (that ASCII standardisation didn't start until 1961 may have something to do with this?)

https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/paper/Ba...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/366193.366201

Knowing it is intended as OR, i can parse it better. I figured it was some item-in-set notation. I also have never seen pipe as an OR outside programming and math.

Some non-alphanumeric characters add brevity and have been more or less adopted by the mainstream, such as ~ being more ergonomic than approximately or approx. Comma, slash, semicolon; these are the ORs of written English and are already the minimal characters count.

I mildly like pipe as you use it but feel it is more confusing and distracting than anything else. A comma or slash would have not interrupted the reading of the sentence. Optimizing for the reader rather than the writer seems a good default position.

Edit: you replied elsewhere using pipe with parentheses or curly braces; very, very clear in those cases. Had you used that in your original, I would have had no confusion

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