From: Dan Janowski <danj@3skel.com>
Date: 2004-05-21T14:35:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Zero is true ... whoda thunk?

I found this problem thorny when trying to export true/false to a 
database that does not support booleans (only int). So I wrote a class 
that magically does the conversion coming and going. Other than that, I 
find nil a very useful value and nice to be separate from numbers.

Dan

On May 20, 2004, at 20:58, David A. Black wrote:

> Hi --
>
> On Fri, 21 May 2004, Dave Burt wrote:
>
>> I've said this elsewhere in the thread, so just briefly here: 
>> true/false can
>> possibly be considered not as basic as nil/object; true and false 
>> would then
>> be seen as a secondary representation of that dichotomy, for 
>> convenience.
>> See [ruby-talk:100755].
>
> There's no nil/object dichotomy, though; nil is an object.  It's handy
> for flagging certain conditions (like failure, as in Regexp#match),
> but that's just a matter of convention; nil itself is still fully an
> object.
>
>
> David
>
> -- 
> David A. Black
> dblack@wobblini.net
>
>