Coding style

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message <e9ksvr$g8u$1 at news.albasani.net>, Georg Brandl wrote:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> In message <Q8OdnfqZn6udnSHZnZ2dnUVZ_vOdnZ2d at nmt.edu>, Bob Greschke
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> I'd go even one step further.  Turn it into English (or your favorite
>>> non-computer language):
>>> 
>>> 1. While list, pop.
>>> 
>>> 2. While the length of the list is greater than 0, pop.
>>> 
>>> Which one makes more sense?  Guess which one I like.  CPU cycles be
>>> damned.
>>> :)
>> 
>> One of my rules is, always program like the language actually has a
>> Boolean type, even if it doesn't. That means, never assume that arbitrary
>> values can be interpreted as true or false, always put in an explicit
>> comparison if necessary so it's obvious the expression is a Boolean.
> 
> You can do that, but it's not considered Pythonic. And it might be
> ineffective.
> 
> Other than in PHP, Python has clear rules when an object of a builtin type
> is considered false (i.e. when it's empty). So why not take advantage of
> this?

Because the clearest rule of all is that True is true, and False is false,
and that's all I want to have to remember.