[SciPy-dev] Arrays as truth values?

[Alan G Isaac]

On Mon, 07 Nov 2005, Travis Oliphant apparently wrote: 
> There will be many though, I'm afraid, who think b or 
> a ought to return element-wise like b | a does.  This is 
> not possible in Python.  Raising an error will at least 
> alert them to the problem which might otherwise give them 
> misleading results. 

User perspective:
I find this persuasive, even though I am unhappy that it 
means a standard Python behavior will disappear.  What's 
more, if the SciPy community should ultimately change its 
mind, it looks easy to back out of raising an error while 
hard to back out of accepting the standard behavior.  So it 
seems the right way to go now as long as the ultimate 
outcome is in doubt.

Cheers,
Alan Isaac