I’m sorry if this seems dumb. I tend to take things literally and “mutual” and “exclusive” seem to be antonyms but mutually exclusive is a term used a lot and it confuses the crap out of me. I’m a native English speaker also.
Does it mean that the two things CAN exist together? I feel like my brain does gymnastics trying to understand the term; I’m not a dumb person but this term just totally eludes me!
Please don’t attack me, just trying to not feel stupid.
In: 49
Here’s how I remember it for computer science problems:
“You can have an apple or an orange.” In normal conversation would mean pick one of the two. In computer science it means as long as you’ve picked AT LEAST one the the fruits, the statement “did he pick an apple or an orange?” Is true because OR in computer science is not mutually exclusive.
We have an XOR which is more of the conversational version of OR.
So, we would say false to the previous statement with a mutually exclusive or if they picked more than one of the fruits.
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