On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:13:38 -0600, Steven Bethard wrote: > It's much easier to explain to newcomers that *, + and - work on True > and False as if they were 1 and 0 than it is to introduce them to a two > element boolean algebra. So making this kind of change needs a pretty > strong motivation from real-world code.
Pretending that False and True are just "magic names" for 0 and 1 might be "easier" than real boolean algebra, but that puts the cart before the horse. Functionality comes first: Python has lists and dicts and sets despite them not being ints, and somehow newcomers cope. I'm sure they will cope with False and True not being integers either. I mean, really, does anyone *expect* True+True to give 2, or that 2**True even works, without having learnt that Python bools are ints? I doubt it. And the old Python idiom for an if...then...else expression: ["something", "or other"][True] tends to come as a great surprise to most newbies. So I would argue that bools being ints is more surprising than the opposite would be. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list