From: sawadatsuyoshi@...
Date: 2016-03-02T10:56:01+00:00
Subject: [ruby-core:74091] [Ruby trunk Feature#12134] Comparison between	`true` and `false`

Issue #12134 has been reported by Tsuyoshi Sawada.

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Feature #12134: Comparison between `true` and `false`
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12134

* Author: Tsuyoshi Sawada
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
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There are some needs to sort elements depending on whether they satisfy certain condition expressed as a predicate. For example, to place prime numbers before others:

~~~RUBY
require "prime"
[7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1].sort_by{|e| Prime.prime?(e) ? 0 : 1} # => [7, 5, 3, 2, 6, 4, 1]
~~~

or to do such sort with the secondary condition to sort by the size:

~~~RUBY
[7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1].sort_by{|e| [Prime.prime?(e) ? 0 : 1, e]} # => [2, 3, 5, 7, 1, 4, 6]
~~~

Here, the temporal assignment of magic numbers `0` and `1` is ad hoc, but ordering between `true` and `false` makes sense. And given that there are `if` construction (which is unmarked case compared to the `unless` construction) and the ternary operator, in which the truthy branch is placed before the falsy branch, I think it makes sense to assume an inherent ordering of `true` being placed before `false`.

So I propose comparison between `true` and `false`:

~~~RUBY
true <=> false # => -1
false <=> true # => 1
~~~

Using this, the cases above can be written more directly as:

~~~RUBY
[7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1].sort_by{|e| Prime.prime?(e)} # => [7, 5, 3, 2, 6, 4, 1]
[7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1].sort_by{|e| [Prime.prime?(e), e]} # => [2, 3, 5, 7, 1, 4, 6]
~~~

---

Please do not confuse this with the common proposal to map booleans to integers, particularly `true.to_i # => 1` and `false.to_i # => 0`. That is arbitrary, and does not make sense. In fact, my proposal goes against such proposal (under the proposal to map booleans, `true.to_i <=> false.to_i` translates to `1 <=> 0 # => 1`, which goes against my proposal `true <=> false # => 01`).



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