Why can't I xor strings?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2004-10-10, Ville Vainio <ville at spammers.com> wrote:
>>>>>> "Grant" == Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> writes:
>
>    Grant> I don't know what you mean by that.  Nobody seems to have a
>    Grant> problem with "and" "or" and "not" operators using the truth
>    Grant> values of strings.  What is there about "xor" that
>    Grant> precludes it from behaving similarly?
>
> It's just that logical xor is an extremely rare beast.

Probably so, but that doesn't support the arguement that
there's something wrong with a logical xor argument coercing
it's operands to boolean values unless one also argues that
the logical "and", "or" and "not" operators should also not
coerce their operands to booleans.

> I would probably prefer to see the operation expanded to the
> more typical and-or-nots in real code.

If logical operators shouldn't coerce operands, then what you
should see is:

 if (bool(string1) and (not bool(string2)) or ((not bool(string1)) and bool(string2))
 
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