Bools and explicitness [was Re: PyWart: The problem with "print"]

[Russ P.]

On Tuesday, June 4, 2013 8:44:11 AM UTC-7, Rick Johnson wrote:

> Yes, but the problem is not "my approach", rather the lack
> 
> of proper language design (my apologizes to the "anointed
> 
> one". ;-)

If you don't like implicit conversion to Boolean, then maybe you should be using another language -- and I mean that in a constructive sense. I'm not particularly fond of it either, but I switched from Python to another language a while back. The issue is not a lack of "proper language design" but rather a language design philosophy that values conciseness and simplicity over explicitness and rigor. 

Implicit conversion to Boolean is only one of many language features that are questionable for critical production software. Another is the convention of interpreting negative indices as counting backward from the end of a list or sequence. Yeah, I thought that was elegant... until it bit me. Is it a bad idea? Not necessarily. It certainly enhances programmer productivity, and it can be done correctly "almost" all the time. But that one time in a hundred or a thousand when you accidentally use a negative index can be a bitch.

But then, what would you expect of a language that allows you to write

x = 1
x = "Hello"

It's all loosey goosey -- which is fine for many applications but certainly not for critical ones.