PEP 285: Adding a bool type

[David Ascher]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> Alex Martelli wrote:
> > I _have_ seen old-time Fortranites rant quite convincingly against that
> > useless, newfangled LOGICAL stuff.
> 
> And that is exactly what many of the responses in this thread
> (including Laura's over-long FUD piece) sound like.
> 
> I'm reading (at least skimming) everything, but the more I read the
> reactions, the more I believe that this is just the response I have to
> expect for *every* change to the language I propose, and the more I'm
> tempted to follow my gut instincts.  

IIRC, there wasn't nearly this much heat in the discussion over the
long/int unification or the type/class unification proposals, even
though the latter especially was much more complicated, ambitious, and
compatibility-challenging.

This reminds me of the old saying about academic politics: "the smaller
the stakes, the more vicious the fights".

IMO, you shouldn't expect unanimity on any language change. 
Furthermore, there's going to be a natural bias for people who are
against an idea proposed by GvR to want to speak up more than those who
agree with him, since they feel they're on the winning side already.

My own take-away from this thread is that Laura identified a compelling
description of what truth testing in Python currently corresponds to. 
Unlike Laura, I don't think that the PEP invalidates the core of the
"something vs. nothing" distinction.  False would just be another form
of nothing and True something.  Which leads to next year's Python
slogan:

     Something is True, and Nothing is False!

or is that, in the words of the late Milton Berle:

     You can fool some of the people some of the time, and all of the
people some of the time, and that's usually enough.

--david

PS: I wish that this much heat got generated discussing changes and
additions to the standard library...