Question regarding stdlib distutils strtobool behavior

[Michael Selik]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 9:26 AM Joseph Bane <havocjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello.
>
> It recently came to my attention that the strtobool function in the
> standard library doesn't return Python native boolean values, but rather
> returns integer 0 or 1:
>
> https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/3.5/Lib/distutils/util.py#l304
>
> I am curious why this is the defined behavior and whether anyone can fill
> me in regarding this approach. For clarity, I would expect the code to
> `return True` and `return False` rather than `return 1` and `return 0`.
>

I'll take a guess: it's probably a(n) historical artifact. Before there
were bools, returning 1 or 0 was the obvious technique. Even after bools
were added to Python 2, returning the literal 1 or 0 was faster than
looking up the names True or False. Now that True and False are keywords,
using the keyword is the obvious solution.