Slash

Slash may refer to:

Slashdot

Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science and technology that are submitted and evaluated by its users. Each story has a comments section attached to it.

Slashdot was founded in 1997 by Hope College student Rob Malda, also known as "Commander Taco", and classmate Jeff Bates, also known as "Hemos". It was acquired by DHI Group, Inc. (i.e., Dice Holdings International, which created the Dice.com website for tech job seekers.)

Summaries of stories and links to news articles are submitted by Slashdot's own readers, and each story becomes the topic of a threaded discussion among users. Discussion is moderated by a user-based moderation system. Randomly selected moderators are assigned points (typically 5) which they can use to rate a comment. Moderation applies either -1 or +1 to the current rating, based on whether the comment is perceived as either "normal", "offtopic", "insightful", "redundant", "interesting", or "troll" (among others). The site's comment and moderation system is administered by its own open source content management system, Slash, which is available under the GNU General Public License.

Slash (punctuation)

The slash (US) or stroke (UK), formally the solidus (/), is an oblique slanting line used as a punctuation mark and for various other purposes. It has several other historical or technical names.

History

Slashes may be found in early writing as a variant form of dashes, vertical strokes, &c. The present use of a slash distinguished from such other marks derives from the medieval European virgule (Latin: virgula, lit. "twig"), which was used as a period, scratch comma, and caesura mark. The Fraktur script used throughout Central Europe in the early modern period used a single slash as a scratch comma and a double slash (//) as a dash. The scratch comma was eventually shortened into the modern comma ⟨,⟩, while the double dash developed into the double oblique hyphen ⟨⸗⟩ and double hyphen ⟨＝⟩ or ⟨゠⟩ before being usually simplified into various single dashes.

Usage

Conjunction

Connecting alternatives

The slash is commonly used in many languages as a shorter substitute for the conjunction "or", typically with the sense of exclusive or (e.g., the option Y/N permits yes or no but not both).

Connective

Connective may refer to:

See also

Logical connective

In logic, a logical connective (also called a logical operator) is a symbol or word used to connect two or more sentences (of either a formal or a natural language) in a grammatically valid way, such that the sense of the compound sentence produced depends only on the original sentences.

The most common logical connectives are binary connectives (also called dyadic connectives) which join two sentences which can be thought of as the function's operands. Also commonly, negation is considered to be a unary connective.

Logical connectives along with quantifiers are the two main types of logical constants used in formal systems such as propositional logic and predicate logic. Semantics of a logical connective is often, but not always, presented as a truth function.

A logical connective is similar to but not equivalent to a conditional operator.

In language

Natural language

In the grammar of natural languages two sentences may be joined by a grammatical conjunction to form a grammatically compound sentence. Some but not all such grammatical conjunctions are truth functions. For example, consider the following sentences: