If-then

Disposition statements are always tantamount to conditional if-thens. (“Glass is fragile” amounts to “If glass is subjected to a shock, it will break”; “Wood is combustible” comes to “If wood is exposed to fire, it will burn”; and so on.)

Over time, I created a list of some of my own if-thens: If I want to get a lot of original writing done, I go to the library, where I don’t have Internet. If offered wine, I decline.

Or maybe her if-then was shaped more like a question: Surely God would not have brought this child here if it was not His plan to keep her here, right? Our if-thens can be quite similar. If God really loves me, then He won’t let my heart be broken again. If God allows a door to open, then walking through it will bring me joy.

List Formatter makes properly-spaced & indented listings with page breaks; each statement on new line, if-thens and loops called out; a great de-bugger!

Storing (closed) predicate definitions in this form (if all the predicates are so stored, and there never were any cuts or if-thens in the first place, we have the well-known "completion" of a logic program) makes the coding of source-level tools simpler.

1. The problem is well bounded, 2. There are many empirical if/thens that lead to a correct solution, 3. The total number of if/thens is sufficient to bring you close to a right answer (Mazur 1987).

Many if-thens will degrade vector performance below that of a scalar version that computes only the correct branch.

Think of this process as programming with pictures, complete with loops, pauses, if-thens, and so on.

Finally, they use descriptions and statements from set theory to provide material for flowcharting problems that contain multiple decisions (nested if-thens).

Simple statements (like assignments and if-thens) are executed serially.

But I think that the badge system is very motivating, and if one of your goals is to get students to become more proficient in the programming, then this is certainly a way to do that. Because you set not a very high bar toward attaining these things and some of them I think are quite challenging – you know, doing the ones for lists, and the if-thens, and all that.

However, you can neither create multiple if-thens that execute simultaneously, nor create a rule based on a file’s Kind—so this utility’s utility is limited (November 2003).

Have you noticed any similarities between “programming” a mechanical system and writing software? / The logical problems are absolutely the same. In the mechanical and in the computer, there are equivalents of variables and if-thens.

There’s some recursive programming in her that gives more weight to associative and metaphorical thinking than to logical if-thens.