English Language & Usage Asked on May 1, 2021
For years I have used ‘=>’ as a sign meaning ‘should be changed to’ and I have long since forgotten whether this is a personal idiosyncrasy or an actual existing usage.
e.g. “in the sentence above word ‘jive’ => ‘jibe.'”
Is this familiar usage to anyone?
Anyone else besides me, I mean.
In a regular text, I'd simply take it to mean changes/changed into, just like any random arrow, without any sense of desirability. Your particular interpretation is unfamiliar to me, and I believe it is not generally so used. Practice may be different in specific fields.
Of course you could indicate a desirable change with it, but I don't believe this desirability is inherent in the symbol.
As Unreason says, it means implication in formal logic: p => q means "if p, then q", just as p <=> q means "if p, then q; and if q, then p".
Answered by Cerberus_Reinstate_Monica on May 1, 2021
In logic it is used for implication, as shown in the table of symbols given by Wikipedia:
This is the 'demands' sense of 'implies', not the 'suggests'. If statement p is true, it necessarily follows that statement q is also true.
Answered by Unreason on May 1, 2021
The usage is familiar to me also, but I don't know accepted it is. I don't know the approved editorial marks for paper proofreading (proofreading marks, but I've used '=>' in electronic text to say what I think should be done.
Which is to say, it is a reasonable symbol to mean "should be changed to", but therer is no official support for it that I know of.
('=>' has a technical but unrelated meaning in mathematical logic for a very specific kind of implication)
Answered by Mitch on May 1, 2021
Are you sure it is not → [->] rather than ⇒ [=>]? The first one usually mean to substitute in place of the other.
Answered by jimjim on May 1, 2021
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