PEP 285: Adding a bool type

Rich Harkins rich at worldsinfinite.com
Tue Apr 2 07:43:46 EST 2002


On Monday 01 April 2002 04:49 pm, Steve Holden wrote:
> "Gustavo Niemeyer" <niemeyer at conectiva.com> wrote in message
> news:mailman.1017673984.1773.python-list at python.org...
>
> > Hi Martin!
> >
[snip]
>
> Arguably, most of that code should have read
>
>     if ret:
>         ...
>
> rather than
>
>     if ret == None:
>         ...
>
> since the latter has the flavor of "if expr==True".
>
> So, is breaking bad code more excusable than breaking good code ;-)?
>
> regards
>  Steve

Hmmm... this is slightly OT for the thread but I have made a bit of a habit 
of doing the following:

if result is None:		# As opposed to result == None
	stuff

This is somewhat out of paranoia, and slightly out of interest in speed (my 
recollection is that previous Python versions could end up calling __coerce__ 
on comparisons with None and in many of these cases I didn't really want 
that).  Is there any compelling reason not to do this?  Isn't None to be a 
singleton in perpetuity?

Rich




More information about the Python-list mailing list