From: Tim Bates <tim@...>
Date: 2004-05-19T21:31:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Zero is true ... whoda thunk?

David Naseby wrote:
> If milk volume is what? It just doesn't read well, it doesn't express
> intent.. its just poor coding, really. I'd contend there's more of a "geeky
> kind of logic" in 0 meaning false.

This "geeky kind of logic" comes from back in the bad old days when 
everyone wrote in assembly language (or C, which has all the power and 
flexibility of assembly language with all the portability of assembly 
language...). In those days, you didn't have bools, or floats, or 
strings - all you had were ints and arrays of ints. So one represented a 
false value as 0 and a true value as 1 (or nonzero).

Tim.

-- 
Tim Bates
tim@bates.id.au