What is the rationale for considering all instances true of a user- defined type? Is it strictly a practical stipulation, or is there something conceptually true about objects?
''' object.__bool__(self) If a class defines neither __len__() nor __bool__(), all its instances are considered true. ''' This makes it so all objects except False, None, 0, and empty containers are true by default. I am not convinced that 'if <a generic object>' should have any meaning; it should probably throw an exception. Is it part of Python's look and feel or its mentality? Is it part of the Zen? Certainly other ideal types can't be cast from generic objects, so why booleans? Is it an ineffable component of the author's vision for the language? I think that giving arbitrary syntactic constructs meaning is just space-filler. It's worse than syntactic sugar, it's semantic sugar. Why not assign meanings willy- nilly to other random juxtapositions of tokens? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
