On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: > >> (Flipping the booleans makes no sense to me. When would 0 mean true >> and 1 mean false? Isn't it much more likely that, for instance, 0 >> means success and nonzero means error (and maybe there's just one >> error state, so 1 means failure)?) > > You've answered your question, I believe. In some contexts – such as > Unix shell – 0 ⇒ success ⇒ true, and non-0 ⇒ failure ⇒ false. > > The Unix commands ‘true’ and ‘false’ follow that convention > <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_and_false_%28commands%29>.
Yes, but my point is: You shouldn't need to rebind those names (or have names "true" and "false" for 0 and 1). Instead, use "success" and "failure". That is to say: The function doesn't return a boolean for whether it did something or not, it returns an error code (or 0 if no error). I agree with the presentation, but have never seen code that does this; it's like saying "Python worst practice: Defining your integer constants using Shakespeare syntax. Python best practice: Defining your integer constants as decimal or hexadecimal digits.", in that nobody would ever do the worst-practice side of it. But maybe I've lived a sheltered life... ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
