bool behavior in Python 3000?

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Tue Jul 10 15:13:38 EDT 2007


Alan G Isaac wrote:
>  > Do you care to explain what is broken?
> 
> I suppose one either finds coercion of arithmetic operations to int
> to be odd/broken or does not.  But that's all I meant.
> 
> My preference would be for the arithmetic operations *,+,-
> to be given the standard interpretation for a two element
> boolean algebra:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-element_Boolean_algebra

If I understand this right, the biggest difference from the current 
implementation would be that::

     True + True == True

instead of:

     True + True == 2

What's the advantage of that? Could you give some use cases where that 
would be more useful than the current behavior?

It's much easier to explain to newcomers that *, + and - work on True 
and False as if they were 1 and 0 than it is to introduce them to a two 
element boolean algebra. So making this kind of change needs a pretty 
strong motivation from real-world code.

Steve



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