Larry Wall wrote:
On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 12:28:15PM -0700, Marcus Adair wrote:
: Isn't saying "false doesn't exist" like saying, "dark doesn't exist"? : Why have a word for that?
: : I'm really afraid I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm worried : that neither "whether" nor "indeed" work very well in many contexts. It : seems to me that testing trueness exists in so many contexts that it's : going to be hard to find an English word that fits all the important : ones.
Most of those contexts are implicitly boolean, and this function would
be redundant there. The main use for this function is to provide a
boolean context for its argument and return 0 or 1 when you really
do want 0 or 1 for some context that isn't directly boolean. This
is actually relatively rare.
Doesn't C< +?(...) > take care of those cases?
Sure, it's line noise, but do we really need a new keyword for something that's "relatively rare"?
Especially when that keyword is likely to confuse people a lot more than the application of two unary operators?
-- Rod Adams
