Implicit conversion to boolean in if and while statements

[Ranting Rick]

On Jul 15, 11:03 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jul 2012 22:15:13 -0400, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:

> It boggles my mind that people who are perfectly happy to program to an
> interface or protocol when it comes to (say) iterables, numbers or even
> big complex classes with dozens of methods, suddenly freak out at the
> thought that you can say "if obj" and obj is duck-typed.

"if obj" is in essence doing "if bool(obj)" behind the scenes. My
question is: Why hide such valuable information from the reader? It's
obvious that "if bool(obj)" will return a boolean; whereas "if obj" is
ambiguous.

> There's a distinct lack of concrete, actual problems from duck-typing
> bools, and a heavy over-abundance of strongly-held opinion that such a
> thing is self-evidently wrong.

If the multitudes of misunderstandings from "if obj" on this list have
not convinced you yet, then i lack the energy to educate you!

> > As far as I know, the only use of having a polymorphic boolean
> > conversion is reducing the amount of typing we do.
>
> The same could be said about *every* polymorphic function.

For which "bool" IS!

Wikipedia to the rescue:
"""In computer science, polymorphism is a programming language feature
that allows values of different data types to be handled using a
uniform interface. The concept of parametric polymorphism applies to
both data types and functions. A function that can evaluate to or be
applied to values of different types is known as a polymorphic
function."""

bool("a") -> True
bool(0) -> False
bool([1,2,3]) -> True
bool(True) -> True

> The benefit is not just because you don't wear out your keyboard as fast.
> The benefit is the same for all other polymorphic code: it lets you write
> better code faster with fewer bugs and less need for unnecessary type
> restrictions.

There are NO type restrictions for bool.

> If there are a few corner cases where you actually *need* to restrict the
> type of your flags to a actual bool, well, Python gives you the tools to
> do so.

Yes, the bool()