On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 11:52 AM Christopher Barker <python...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 3:37 PM Greg Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> > wrote: >> >> > However, that ship has sailed. I think it would have been minimally >> > disruptive when True and False were first introduced, >> >> It would have been just as disruptive back then -- that's the >> reason bool was made a subclass of int in the first place. > > > I know why, but I'm not so sure -- no one was using a built in True or False > as an integer, because they didn't exist.
No, but AIUI people were creating their own globals to do that job. And in Python 2, True and False weren't keywords, just built-ins, so you could keep on writing "True = 1" and everything would be fine. > I suppose folks were using the results of, e.g. `a == b` as an integer, but > how often? Where else is an explicit True or False returned by Python itself? > Actually, I do that sort of thing periodically. Or rather, I use it as an index, which comes to the same thing. Every language I've used since leaving BASIC behind has allowed me to use a comparison as if it were a 1 or a 0. (Many of them because 1 and 0 *are* the values for true and false.) Well, every language except one, and even that one has some oddities that make the values mostly equivalent. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/WCD2MSIJE6RKUAW6NKFRMFY4KJL3HZ6K/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
