word choice - How can I describe a "one or more" condition (one that has many options; a "non-boolean")?

Generally speaking a boolean condition is understood to be an "either/or" relationship; for example, something is hot or cold.

What's do you call a "one or more" condition, e.g. something that can have many colors?

To add a bit of clarification, in conversation most people understand Boolean to be an "either/or" proposition, whether there are two or more conditions, as when you ask someone to pick a single color of paint (red, green, or blue).

When discussing that with non-programmers, I find they perfectly understand that when I describe it as a boolean condition.

However, I don't seem to know what to call a "one or more" condition, for example, "pick any colors that you like: red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple."

I find my self saying "non-boolean" which isn't all that useful.

-- EDIT --

Rubergly's answer gave me an interesting thought:

Boolean is similar to "dichotomous" and also similar to "binary" (1 or 0). Trinary means set of three... so is "polynary" a word, or is there something similar?

Answer

There are many existing terms for a number possible concepts that you might be using:

• if you are talking about a question/situation that has one outcome (functional) out of many distinct choices, like one out of many but a finite set of colors, then it is discrete or nominal (the latter technical for statistics).


• if you are considering a situation where you get many results at once, like red, blue, and green together from the rainbow, then it is multivalued, a subset, a tuple, or n-ary (the latter 3 are technical). 'n-ary' is probably not in any nontechnical dictionary but is in wide use in mathematical language.

There's a lot of technical math vocabulary that may or may not be appropriate in informal conversation; one can consider the kinds of values returned (as in computer programming the type like boolean, int, or real) and also the number of different values returned (for a person - height, eye color, handedness). Here is a small taxonomy:

• number of values returned
  
  
  
  • single value = functional
  
  
  • multiple value = relational (or multivalued)
    
    
    
    • a given set number of values returned is fixed arity
    
    
    
    • variable being n-ary or polyadic (multivariate for arguments, __multivalued for results),
    
    
  
  


• the range/possibilities of a given single value
  
  
  
  • continuous
  
  
  • discrete, and discrete has a number of words to describe variations (binary, boolean, dichotomous, nominal, integral, combinatorial)