Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> writes:
> Of course it won't be clear to *everyone* but it should be clear
> enough to people who are familiar with standard Python idioms. A
> concrete example should be more obvious than the fake example:
>
> title = ('Mr', 'Ms')[person.sex == 'F']
>
> which should be clear to anyone who understands indexing in Python and
> that True == 1 and False == 0.
I consider it an accident of history, and one which should not be
necessary to understand Python code.
In other words, I consider code which exploits the equality of True with
1, or False with 0, is code with a leaky abstraction and should be
fixed.
> Although that's probably better written as a dict lookup:
>
> title = {'M': 'Mr', 'F': 'Ms'}[person.sex]
>
> which is then more easily extended to support intersex and
> non-traditional[1] gender identities.
It's true that gender is not a binary, but even if it were, this would
be a bad idea.
A schema which blurs the distinction between boolean versus integer is a
code smell: it speaks to the high likelihood that the “flag” really
represents an entity which will soon have more than two states, and
should never have been represented as a boolean.
--
\ “As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of |
`\ the demand.” —Josh Billings |
_o__) |
Ben Finney
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