Re: Primitive Boolean type?

[David Wheeler]

On Friday, November 1, 2002, at 12:24  PM, Michael Lazzaro wrote:

So what is the "official" way to efficiently store the result of a boolean expression, for example? If not as a "bit", then what?

If anything, I would suggest a primitive type, "bool", that has no promoted type "Bool". It can just be a placeholder -- a "bit" alias -- but I still don't understand the compelling reason for saying:

has bit $.is_plugged_in;

when WYM is, unambiguously:

has boolean $.is_plugged_in;

The problem with this is that you have explicitly introduced true and false into the language, and have therefore destroyed the utility of context:

my boolean $bool = 0; # False.
my $foo = ''; # False context.
if ($foo eq $bool) {
# Oops!
}

Regards,

David

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