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Is this an instance of complement fronting?

loichyan
>We define the bitwise OR, bitwise AND, and bitwise XOR of two strings of the same length to be the strings that have **as their bits** the OR, AND, and XOR of the corresponding bits in the two strings, respectively. —— *Discrete Mathematics and Its Application* Hi, I am trying to understand the function of "as their bits" in the sentence above. Is it an instance of complement fronting? If so, can that attributive clause be rewritten as "that have the OR, AND, and XOR of the corresponding bits in the two strings as their bits"? I have struggled for hours to find an appropriate grammatical explanation in various books, but none of them discuss this type of complement fronting :( Thanks in advance!

3 comments

DigitalOhmu•
What's important here is that the sentence is defining a set of strings with a certain property. The range of the function, OR/AND/XOR, is the set of bit strings where each bit is the OR/AND/XOR of the pair of corresponding bits in the input. "As their X" is a standard way of describing properties formally in technical writing, but doesn't commonly appear elsewhere and most native speakers would be equally confused by it. I don't really know what complement fronting means. I hope that helps.
MossyPiano•
Please try to avoid technical terms like "complement fronting" and "attributive clause" in your questions. I'm a native English speaker with a degree in linguistics, and this is the first time I've encountered those terms. You will get more useful answers if you phrase your questions in ordinary language. Having said that, if you're asking whether the sentence can be rephrased as you did, the answer is that it can. It's just a bit less confusing to phrase it the way it is in the original text.
chayat•
The "as thier bits" at the end feels clunky but I can't think of a better way to structure the sentance. I used to teach computer science at a college and I would have been happy with this from any of my students.