code review

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 1:23 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> All the worse for those languages, since they violate the semantics of
> mathematical notation.

Not so. It simply means that booleans are nothing special. In REXX,
there are no data types at all, and "1" and "0" are your booleans. In
C, boolean and comparison operations return integers, either 1 or 0.
Same was true of Python early on, if I understand correctly. It's not
shameful.

> The more I learn about C, the less I want to know about C. What sort of
> crazy language designer thought that having
>
> 2 == 2 == 2
>
> return 0 (false) was a good idea?

It makes perfect sense though; your comparisons simply return
integers, so you can legally index using them. A simple binary tree
can work thus:

node child[2];

next_node = child[search_value>current_value];

> Sheer craziness for C to abuse mathematical notation like that. But what
> is one to expect from a language where
>
> (unsigned)-1 == -1
>
> apparently is true.

Of course it's true. When you compare an unsigned value to a signed
one, the signed value is automatically up-cast to unsigned, in the
same way that comparing 32-bit and 64-bit integers will do. So
whatever rule the compiler uses to cast your first -1 to unsigned will
be used to cast the second to unsigned, and they'll be equal.

As to "2 == 2 == 2": I don't see it as a problem that:

x = (2 == 2)
y = (x == 2)
z = (2 == 2 == 2)

leave y and z as the same. There are different ways of interpreting
the z statement, but having it identical to y is certainly a plausible
one.

ChrisA