Inclusive OR? Wtf?

[Jackalope]

I'm studying propositional logic and I learned that "or" means "at least one is true". So you could have "a or b" and even if both a and b were each true then "a or b" is still true. In everyday language however "or" means only one of two things can be true, not both hence the reason we have the phrase "and/or" to mean "at least one is true".

Why not just keep the traditional exclusive meaning of "or" in propositional logic and then have another symbol for "and/or"? Seems simpler to me.

It greatly simplifies things to have two different operators for OR and XOR. Otherwise, the nonexclusive OR would have to be written as " if (a or b) or (a and b)". In my experience, the nonexclusive OR is much more commonly used.

In computer languages, the lack of a non-exclusive or would also make some operations less optimal - something like:

if (null == s || s.equals("")) {
// some operation
}


Would be extremely cumbersome to write as a single check. You'd have to do something like this to make it's meaning apparent:

if (null == s) {
// some operation
} else if s.equals("") {
// same operation
}

There's no straightforward way to code it using a nonexclusive or without the code throwing a null pointer exception.