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Posted By Saldiven on 03/10/2006 9:58 AM
I see a lot of references to an "exclusive or." In all the reading and looking around in my grammar books, I can find no reference to an "exlusive or."

Thats because it isn't an English term, its a programming one, which does however correlate to the "exclusive disjunction" in English.

XOR is a logical operator that results in true if one of the operands, but not both of them, is true. If applied to this case, and I'm not saying that it does apply, you can have either Elites or Heavies, but not both, as the inclusion of both would create a double positive resulting in a negative due to the fundamental qualities of XOR.

 

The entire debate can be summed up like this: Does the entry mean,

 1) Elites OR Heavy?

2) Elites XOR Heavy?

 

1) Allows for both, while 2) limits you to one or the other.

Due to the nature of the english language, I think its impossible to tell without any further information from the developers.

As you probably know, 'exclusive or' is a logical operation shorthanded XOR. It is true that 'or' in English cannot be expressed as XOR without context - There's just no single word for it, hence the invented logical shortcut XOR. Again, through the thread we discussed essentially wether the surrounding text for other rules constitutes a context to interpret the 'or' under Heed the wisdom of the ancients as an XOR. We also found out that XOR would only matter in this case if you interpreted the army list validation process in a very specific way, which is a process entirely unspecified by the rules.

So the conclusions are pretty neat and tidy at this point. I'm not sure that arguing over the existence of an XOR argument in the English language is going to get us anywhere.

 

-Edit: Yeah what Loki said.  My posts are taking 30+ minutes to register.  Woo!

 

Ah-ha! And there we hit on the entire problem with the analysis of this rule in this thread.

The rule was not written in programming language or in a series of logical premises. It was written in English. Using a form of literary analysis called "closed" or "strict" interpretation, everything we need to know about the rule is included in its text.

Blue Loki states that due to the nature of the English language, it is impossible to know what was intended without getting info from the developers. I beg to disagree. Moz states that there is no "single word" for XOR in the English laguage. To this, I do agree.

It is as simple as this: to express XOR in the English language, you write "Either A or B." This is exclusive. In this construct, only one selection is possible. Without the "either...or" construction, the "or" is permissive, not exclusive.

Ironically, in common usage, many people will write the fail to use the "either...or" construct when they mean to be exclusive. For example: "You can have death by hanging or by firing squad." Obviously, you cannot have death by both; only one choice can be made. This is incorrect by the rules of SWE; it should be expressed in "either...or" fashion.

I think our analysis of the rule in this thread is actually ok since we came to the same conclusions already. *Poke*  *Jab*<POKE><JAB>

The XOR as we agree is constructed from 'or' and additional context (either x or y, x or y but not both). I basically am within a group that sees the consistent use of and/or for all of the other entries as a relevant context for making the 'or' an XOR for 'Heed'.

Your common usage example is interesting because of another earlier bit to this discussion regarding the validation system. Anyone arguing for the possibility of 6 dreads under the one-at-a-time validation system is inadvertantly arguing for an XOR as well, since obviously a single dread cannot be chosen as a heavy and an elite. This is a serious problem for the other entries then: how do you validate a Devastator squad under honor your wargear if you may take a single dev squad as a Heavy and/or Elite. I believe this will actually kill the list-validation 'style' argument which will leave us back with: Is there enough context to claim the 'or' in Heed is an XOR.

But hey, if it's questionable (like Doom siren + Pfist, don't use it... Unless it's space marines.)

Here's a question. If they meant for it to be one or the other, why even mention elites? If you wanted to take them as elites, you don't need to take the trait.

edit:  corrected heavy to elite

Actually, Dreads are Elites, normally. So, yes you would need the trait to take them as Heavy Support.

Yeah.  Mixed up heavy with elite.  What I get for playing Blood Angels and Chaos. Think of dreads as heavy.

Regardless of what the trait does for heavy & elite dreads, it removes the 0-1 restriction on Venerable Dreadnaughts.