On 7/15/2012 1:34 AM, Andrew Berg wrote:
This has probably been discussed before, but why is there an implicit
conversion to a boolean in if and while statements?
if not None:
print('hi')
prints 'hi' since bool(None) is False.
If this was discussed in a PEP, I would like a link to it. There are so
many PEPs, and I wouldn't know which ones to look through.
Converting 0 and 1 to False and True seems reasonable, but I don't see
the point in converting other arbitrary values.
Because Boolean types were an afterthought in Python. See PEP 285.
If a language starts out with a Boolean type, it tends towards
Pascal/Ada/Java semantics in this area. If a language backs
into needing a Boolean type, as Python and C did, it tends to have
the somewhat weird semantics of a language which can't quite decide
what's a Boolean. C and C++ have the same problem, for exactly the
same reason - boolean types were an afterthought there, too.
John Nagle
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