[Python-Dev] For review: PEP 285: Adding a bool type

[Guido van Rossum]

> You started this game and asked for these many arguments :-)

OK, I've played enough. :-)

> My only objection is overriding the __str__ method. Everything
> else is just fine.

Good.

> You don't have a boolean type in the sense of algebra, but we 
> can't change that due to Python's history and a true algebraic 
> boolean type can easily be written as extension, so it doesn't
> worry me much.

Agreed.  There's only so much we can do without applying the time
machine to 12 years of code developed by 100,000s of people.

> Hmm, perhaps you should name the type "truth" or "truthvalue" 
> rather than boolean.

Yuck.  It's called bool (or Boolean) everywhere else, even when the
semantics are defined to be just different names for 0 and 1.  I don't
like to innovate here.

> Could be... I don't like it when things are broken on purpose
> just to have an interactive session return "nice" output. I also
> don't like scanning tons of code to find the few instances
> where this change breaks application interop.
> 
> There must be other ways to satisfy your requirements and
> mine.

We'll see.  I'm flexible.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)