"Jeff Shirton" wrote in message ...
"Mark Houlsby" wrote in message
om...

so clearly one of your 'improvements' does not appear to
improve the clarity of my phrasing. 'iff ' is a standard
abbreviation for 'if and only if.'

That's news to me.

Well, he's right.


Not for one moment did I suspect that he was *not* right...

I can find no reference to this. Could you cite one, please?

I did a Google search on iff+"if and only if". Here are some
of the results:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?...nd%20only%20if
http://splorg.org/people/tobin/projects/quinto/iff.html
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/arc...001-00773.html

It's even in the Merriam-Webster dictionary!
http://www.m-w.com/

I guess you didn't look very hard, did you?


Indeed not...I have a life. I think that the crucial point is that
because, evidently, I am more ignorant of the topic than you are, I
was unsure of exactly *which* search criteria to stipulate, which
resulted in my searches throwing up a lot of chaff, but no wheat that
I could discern. If I had possessed your, or Mr. Bourbaki's, knowledge
of the term "iff" I might have been able to take more care in choosing
search criteria. Thanks to Mr. Bourbaki and you, I am now a little
less ignorant of the term.

In my defence, I should point out that I am not a mathematician, and
that this newsgroup pertains neither to mathematics, nor to logic, but
to *chess*, and that therefore this might excuse my ignorance of this
rather specialist term.

My principal argument with the troll Marc Margolies concerned his
having been incredibly rude to a newbie. Worse, in being incredibly
rude, he betrayed his own carelessness, ignorance and stupidity. Let
us hope that he has now stopped.

Thanks for your post.

Mark