question of style

[Albert van der Horst]

In article <7x8wj2agma.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>,
Paul Rubin  <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
>Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> writes:
>> > but I don't accept that "somethingness"
>> > vs. "nothingness" is the same distinction as truth vs falsehood.
>>
>> It's the distinction used by Python since the dawn of time. Python only
>> grew a bool type a few versions back.
>
>That's true, part of the situation we have now is an artifact of that
>history.
>
>> I'm not talking about the constants True and False (nouns), but about
>> true and false values (adjectives).
>
>But, it seems to me, the constants True and False are the only values
>to which the adjectives "true" and "false" should be applicable to.
>
>>
>> > The idea that the "if"
>> > statement selects between "somethingness" and "nothingness" rather than
>> > between True and False is a bogus re-imagining of the traditional
>> > function of an "if" statement
>>
>> There's nothing bogus about it.
>>
>> > and has been an endless source of bugs in Python code.
>> I wonder why these "endless" bugs weren't important enough to be
>> mentioned in the rationale to PEP 285:
>
>Because adding the bool type doesn't really fix those bugs.
>
>> describing `if x` as the "correct form" and calling scrapping such a
>> feature as "crippling the language".
>
>Certainly, changing "if" would have broken an immense amount of code
>and been a completely unworkable approach.  We are using a fairly
>mature language by now; it has a culture and history that carries
>certain baggage, as one should expect.
>
>> > Look how much confusion it causes here in the newsgroup all the time.
>> The only confusion is that you're causing me. Would you care to link to
>> some?
>
>This current discussion (about bools) came from such confusion just a
>few posts up in this very thread:
>
>    From: upwestdon <upwestdon at gmail.com>
>    Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 23:03:39 -0700 (PDT)
>    How about just:
>
>    if not (self.higher and self.lower):
>        return self.higher or self.lower
>
>That test was designed to treat None as a boolean False, without
>noticing that numeric 0 is also treated as False and could make the
>test do the wrong thing.  This is an extremely common type of error.
>
>> > could see some value to having a generic "is_empty" predicate
>> We have that already. It's spelled __bool__ or __nonzero__
>
>That's fine, but under the "explicit is better than implicit"
>principle, it's preferable to call that predicate explicitly:
>"if bool(x): ..." rather than "if x:".  Also, after many years of

Maybe I'm missing something here, but if self.higher contains 0,
wouldn't bool(self.higher) evaluate to False?
So how does this help?

Groetjes Albert

--
-- 
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert at spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst