PEP 285: Adding a bool type

[Paul Rubin]

aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:
> That said, seems to me that booleans are the stuff of a minor release,
> unless you claim that minor releases should never contain language
> changes.

IMO, minor releases shouldn't contain language changes unless there's
a real sense that substantial numbers of users are yearning for the
change and don't want to wait for the next major release to get it.
The best reason for that is if the change makes some programming task
substantially easier than it was before.

That might be true of generators but it's certainly not true of bools.
Even users who favor adding bools aren't likely to say there's urgency
to adding them.  Bools are just a cosmetic change and people can
survive continuing to use 1 and 0 for a few more minor releases.

Think of a co-worker who needs to ask you a lot of questions in the
course of his work.  Would you rather have him interrupt you by
calling you every 5 minutes whenever he thinks of a new question, or
have him save the non-urgent questions for a daily meeting where you
can cover them all in one shot?  I'd rather minimize the interruptions.