[Python-3000] Wither PEP 335 (Overloadable Boolean Operators)?

[Robert Kern]

Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>> Giovanni Bajo wrote:
>>> Another workaround could be:
> 
> Before focusing mental talents on workarounds and implementations,
> it would be worthwhile to consider whether the idea would help or
> hurt the language.  The and/or keywords already have some complexity
> due to their returning non-boolean values.  IMO, it would be a disservice
> to the language to further complexify their meanings.  Right now, at least, 
> we can make a static reading of the code and have a good idea of what 
> the and/or keywords mean.

It would probably hurt the language, and for the record, I'm against it. We
already have problems with rich comparisons not reliably returning booleans.
It's a fairly common occurrence to do equality testing against generic data
types. For example, finding if an object is in a list with list.index().
However, this does not reliably work when == can return something that is not
interpretable as a boolean value like numpy arrays do. I don't think rich
comparisons are a mistake (I use them much more frequently than I use
list.index(), for example), but propagating the uncertainty further is probably
a mistake. For numpy, the bitwise operators |&~ work fine on boolean arrays, and
that's all such operators really need to work on.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco