PEP 308: "then" "else" for deprecating "and" "or" side effects
Erik Max Francis
max at alcyone.com
Fri Feb 14 00:58:23 EST 2003
Christian Tismer wrote:
> Due to the presence of a real boolean type, we
> should ask ourselves if "and" and "or" shouldn't be
> deprecated in their current meaning, towards being
> "boolean only"?
No, I don't think so. Their use is already too well-entrenched to want
to do something like this.
> "and" and "or" are behaving like logical operators.
> They happen to do this by not providing a plain
> truth value, but by promoting one of their operands.
They _are_ logical operators. They just do their logical by returning
one of the objects, rather than a strict Boolean. Other languages do
this, like Lisp; there's nothing inherently wrong with it. It's also
way too entrenched to change now. It's an example of a feature that I
don't often rely on, but even I, a champion of the Booleans PEP,
wouldn't think to change their behavior now.
--
Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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