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    I regret that I have but one upvote to give. I was very surprised to discover that apparently a lot of the programmers here have never heard of "iff" given how useful and common it is. But I agree wholeheartedly with your second point: it's not their fault when no one taught them something before, and the solution is to teach them now. Commented Nov 18, 2024 at 16:03
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    @Miss_Understands "you can download believe the common read doesn't. till you're writing for" - what? I can't parse your comment. Commented Nov 18, 2024 at 22:18
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    There are times when I want to read documentation to understand a piece of code, and there are times when I want to learn useful (but inessential) new words. The overlap between these is virtually zero. Commented Nov 19, 2024 at 14:08
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    @Sneftel I'd say the whole point of documentation is to learn things, which includes not only code but also ways to talk about code. Of course what you don't want is anything that unnecessarily distracts from the information that you're actually searching for, but the nice thing about "iff" is that it has low distraction and confusion potential for those who don't understand it. Meanwhile, for those who do understand it it's a time saver because it makes the statement unambiguous without introducing boilerplate that would make the documentation unwieldier to read than it needs to be. Commented Nov 19, 2024 at 14:30
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    "which includes not only code but also ways to talk about code"... no. If I am reading documentation about a particular piece of code, I only want to learn about that particular piece of code. If I want you to give me an inessential vocabulary lesson, I will ask you for one. Commented Nov 19, 2024 at 17:31