User:Nayru25/sandbox/A Style Guide for Boolean Connectives
This is not a Wikipedia article: It is an individual user's work-in-progress page, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable. For guidance on developing this draft, see Wikipedia:So you made a userspace draft. Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Motivation
[edit]Currently (May 2018) the pages for the Logical Connectives are a mess of competing styles and presentations, which hinders comprehension. I propose this style guide to define a common presentation for all the boolean connectives.
Scope
[edit]The article Logical connectives, and the articles
Boolean Connectives
[edit]Article Layout
[edit]With exception to Negation and Material Conditional, as they have a more general scope.
- The Lead section should
- Provide the unicode characters for the connective so people can copy and paste it
- Have a link to the equivalent logic gate, if there is one
- Include the relevant Venn Diagram
- Discuss prominent alternative notation
- Sections should include, in this order
- A section for the definition, including
- A sub-section on the truth table of the connective.
- If there is anything more to add on the Venn diagram for the connective, a sub-section for that.
- A sub-section on equivalent logical formulas
- Other alternative notation, not noted in the Lead
- History, if any of note
- A section for the definition, including
Typesetting of Formulas
[edit]- In general, use
<math>...</math>
to display logical formulas. - Use math upper case roman letters, that is not for terminal symbols.
- Prefer over
- Current exceptions include
- Logical_conjunction and Logical_disjunction, which uses and , because there's too much to change at the moment
- Material_implication, which uses and , because of historical reasons
- This is mostly fine because material implication has a broader reach than the boolean operators
- Logical_biconditional which uses and until about halfway, then uses and because of the images
- Current exceptions include
Connectives
[edit]In general,
Sheffer stroke | Prefer to |
Converse implication | Prefer to |
Implication | Prefer to |
Disjunction | Prefer to |
Negation | Prefer to , or |
Exclusive or | Prefer to , or |
Biconditional | Prefer to , or |
Joint denial | Use |
Material nonimplication | Prefer to |
Converse nonimplication | Prefer to |
Logical conjunction | Prefer to , , or |
Truth Tables
[edit]For boolean connectives the table should look like
T | T | ? |
T | F | ? |
F | T | ? |
F | F | ? |
using T and F for the truth-values, and without the headings "Input" and "Output", as a boolean connective expresses a relation, not a computation.
Logic Gates
[edit]Article Layout
[edit]- The Lead section should have a link to the equivalent boolean connective.
Typesetting of Operators
[edit]- Terminal symbols should be upper case roman, sans-serif (i.e. A over a)
- Prefer A, B, C to P, Q, R
Truth Tables
[edit]For logic gates, the truth table should look like
Input | Output | |
A | B | A OP B |
0 | 0 | ? |
0 | 1 | ? |
1 | 0 | ? |
1 | 1 | ? |
using 1 and 0 as the truth-values, and starting with "0 0" at the top.
(This appears to be the style used in the articles on logic gates; I would prefer to start with "1 1", but there may be some reason I'm not aware of that they start with "0 0")
Engineering Notation
[edit]Engineering notation is recommended when writing formulae for logic gates.
Typesetting
[edit]- Use
<math>...</math>
- Use math upper case roman letters, that is not for terminal symbols
- Prefer over
Disjunction | Use |
Negation | Use , not |
Exclusive or | Use |
Logical conjunction | Prefer over , except when used for emphasis |