Is the difference between "whether or not" and "if" trivial in english (I'm French) ? I think I understand the third point in the Caveats section. However I only understand the last sentence from context. Is there already an explanation on Arbital of the difference between "whether or not" and "if" as used here ?
Comments
Patrick Stevens
This is not universally agreed-upon, but I use "A decides whether or not B holds" to mean "A outputs 1 if B holds, and outputs 0 otherwise".
If I said "A decides if B holds", I would consider that ambiguous: it might mean "A outputs 1 if B holds" without the requirement on A's behaviour if B doesn't hold.