Moving literals within clauses

Abstract

Abstract The classical representation of a clause is a disjunction of literals. However, any such clause can be rewritten, with no loss of equivalence, as a sentence in conditional format having the form disjunction of literals if conjunction of literals Thus a clause such as A or B or ,C or ,D or ,E can be rewritten, for example, in this conditional format or B if C&D&E Starting with the classical format, we obtained this new format by disjoining, on the left of an ‘if’, all the positive literals and by conjoining, on the right of the ‘if’, all the atomic parts of the negative literals. That the two versions are equivalent is owed solely to the logical interpretations of the connectives: