Re: "0", true or false? (was: PERL6STORM #0052)
"David L. Nicol" wrote: > > Bart Lateur wrote: > > > Bitwise and, or and xor do distinguish strings from numbers, and return > > entirely different kinds of results. Why can't anything else? > > Absolutely. There is such a thing as Too Much Convenience. I think > BOOL as a context or an accessor method should be separate from STRING and > NUMBER so that if you know, you can suggest which behavior you want out > of a particular scalar variable, or stick with the misguidable default. See RFC 159 - BOOLEAN, STRING, and NUMBER are the three main methods. -Nate
Re: "0", true or false? (was: PERL6STORM #0052)
Bart Lateur wrote: > Bitwise and, or and xor do distinguish strings from numbers, and return > entirely different kinds of results. Why can't anything else? Absolutely. There is such a thing as Too Much Convenience. I think BOOL as a context or an accessor method should be separate from STRING and NUMBER so that if you know, you can suggest which behavior you want out of a particular scalar variable, or stick with the misguidable default. -- David Nicol 816.235.1187 [EMAIL PROTECTED] "After jotting these points down, we felt better."
"0", true or false? (was: PERL6STORM #0052)
On Thu, 21 Sep 2000 05:21:27 -0600, Tom Christiansen wrote: >=item perl6storm #0052 > >Make "0" (more?) true so that people don't get surprised. > >or > >Make "0.00" (more?) false so that people don't get surprised. Yup. This tripped me up, years ago, followed by a heated discussion on comp.lang.perl.misc. At the time, the docs even said that only undef, 0 and "" are false. That makes sense. "0" is, to be pedant, not one of those 3. It is just a nonempty string with numerical value zero. So is "0E0", and "0.0". IMO, the only false string should be the empty string. If you want to test it as a number, then convert it to a number, for example by adding zero to it! Bitwise and, or and xor do distinguish strings from numbers, and return entirely different kinds of results. Why can't anything else? -- Bart.
