RE: Boolean value: Whether or Not or IF

["Andrew Warren" <awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com>]

Rob Hudson wrote:

> If you're describing a boolean column in a document, for example
> "EnableBackButton," would you describe it as:
>
> "Whether or not the back button should appear on the screen" or
> "If the back button should appear on the screen" or
> "Should the back button appear on the screen?"

Rob:

Without the entire context, it's hard to choose an exact wording; you need something that fits in the space allotted, that's parallel with all the other features you're documenting, maybe that translates well into other languages, etc.  I wouldn't use any of those three choices, though.

And -- no offense to Sue and others who suggested it -- I'm also not a big fan of giving up and just calling the list of choices a "description".  I want to see things like "CITY: The city in which the customer lives", not "CITY: Denver if the customer lives in Denver, Los Angeles if the customer lives in Los Angeles, etc."

Anyway... For me, your last example -- the question -- is just too chatty.  Maybe it could work for other people, though.

Your first two examples are trying to say the same thing -- "Whether the button should appear" -- but they use the wrong words.  "Whether or not" is best used when the meaning is "regardless", and "if" is ambiguous: it can mean "whether", but it can also mean "ONLY if".

If those first two examples fit very well with your context, you can just replace "if" with "whether":

    EnableBackButton:
    Controls whether the Back button should appear on the screen

or clean it up a bit, maybe like this:

    EnableBackButton:
    Controls the visibility of the Back button

-Andrew

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