if-then

plural if-thens · alternative if/then · alternative if–then

1. A proposition or statement about what should or does occur when a certain condition is met.

   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.

   2015, Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits—to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life, Broadway Books, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   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.)

   2007, Nicholas Rescher, Conditionals, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 13

   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.

   2023, Alicia Britt Chole, The Night Is Normal: A Guide Through Spiritual Pain, Tyndale Refresh, →ISBN, page 106

2. computingA conditional statement; a line of code that specifies a Boolean condition to check and a statement to execute when that Boolean evaluates to true.

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

   1994, Compute!, page 30

   5 more examples

   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!

   1981, Apple Orchard, page 31

   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.

   1985, 1985 Symposium on Logic Programming: July 15-18, 1985; Sheraton Boston Hotel Boston, Mass., IEEE Computer Society Press, →ISBN, page 71

   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).

   1989 December, David W. Long, Michael R. Wagner, “Insect Pest Management Expert Systems in Multiresource Management of Ponderosa Pine”, in Multiresource Management of Ponderosa Pine Forests: Nov. 14 - 16, 1989, Flagstaff, Arizona (General Technical Report RM-185), page 260

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

   1992, Donald L. DeAngelis, Louis J. Gross, editors, Individual-Based Models and Approaches in Ecology: Populations, Communities and Ecosystems, Chapman and Hall, →ISBN, pages 154–155

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

   2000, Harold J. Rood, Logic and Structured Design for Computer Programmers, Brooks/Cole, →ISBN, page ix