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Comment by vorg | Hacker News Reader

If you want to delete both if either is true you could write:

  If (a == 3) || (b == 4) delete them

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what if you want to delete a on the b condition?

If there's one condition, use `it`. If there's two, use `this` and `that`, i.e.

  if (a == 3) || (b == 4) delete this //to delete a

and

  if (a == 3) || (b == 4) delete that //to delete b

What if there are three?

Also this should refer to the temporally closer element, so your choices are backwards.

Instead of `it` for one, and `this` and `that` for two, use `este`, `ese` and `aquel` for three (from the 3-tier pronoun system in Spanish).

Please don't ask what if there's four. Very few (if any) natural languages have more than 3 tiers of demontrative pronouns, so computer languages shouldn't -- if they're using ideas natural language to be more readable. They would use identifiers or numeric subscripts instead.

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