How to Implement a Truth Table Generator in Python
A tutorial for creating truth tables for Propositional Logic in Python
In this Python tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a truth table generator for Propositional Logic (PL). If you’re unfamiliar with PL, it might help to first read How To Do Propositional Logic. Furthermore, basic knowledge of the Python programming language is necessary to understand this tutorial.
First, let’s be clear on our goal: it is to build a Python program that receives a (compound) proposition like P ∧ Q as a string (“P ∧ Q”), and write out a truth table for that proposition.
How to write functions for the connectives of Propositional Logic
In order to create truth tables, a key ability our program needs is determining the truth value of a compound proposition. So how do we do this? Say we have P ∧ Q. Its truth value depends on the truth values of P and Q:
So a first implementation of a function to determine the truth value of a conjunction could look as follows:
