[issue37831] bool(~True) == True

Mark Dickinson report at bugs.python.org
Wed Aug 14 10:55:23 EDT 2019


Mark Dickinson <dickinsm at gmail.com> added the comment:

> Because bool is embedded in int, it's okay to return a bool value *that compares equal to the int from the corresponding int operation*.

Agreed that it's okay, but I'd like to understand why it's considered *desirable*. What use-cases benefit from having `x | y` give `True` or `False` rather than `1` or `0` when `x` and `y` are bools? Is the intent that `x & y` and `x | y` provide shorter ways to spell `x and y`, `x or y`, or (as I think Serhiy's suggesting) is this about catering to people coming from other languages and expecting `&` and `|` to be the right operations for doing logic with bools?

>From my integer-centric point of view, | and & are bitwise integer operations, not logical operations; they only *happen* to apply to bool because a bool is an int, but they're not natural boolean operations (in exactly the same way that +, -, *, etc. aren't natural boolean operations). "and" and "or" seem the "one obvious way to do it" for logical operations on bools; I don't think I understand why anyone would want to use | and & on bools to get another bool, instead of just using `or` and `and`.

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue37831>
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