Question

This is very junior, but how does one express a “but” as a conditional statement? The language really doesn’t matter. I was trying to wrap my brain around how it’s interpreted in code and couldn’t seem to find any information when researching.

for example in pseudo-code

 I like Apples, but I like Washington apples more

Answer 1

I think the literal translation of a but into a programming language might be hard, but (/chuckle) you can look at specific instances and find a way to translate them.

For example (using a previous poster’s pees example)

I dislike peas but I'll sometimes eat them in salads

You can somewhat read this as

I don't eat peas but I'll eat them in salads

Given that interpretation, you can treat it as a special case and code it like

if(hasPeas()) {
    if(inSalad()) {
        willEat();
    } else {
        willNotEat();
    }
}

You can almost think of it like a guard or edge case condition. For example, when reading a file (using REALLY bad code to illustrate the idea):

text = "";
while(true) {
    while((count = canRead(fd)) <= 0) { // nothing to read
        if(count == EOF) { // EOF is a magic value meaning there will never be more to read
            return text;
        }
        wait(1000); // wait a bit to see if more text shows up to read
    }
    text += read(fd, count);
}