From: Steven Haryanto <steven@...>
Date: 2001-06-16T13:10:40+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:16528] why only nil and false are regarded as false?

I would appreciate some explanation on why Ruby behaves like 
this since this is in contrary to most languages I know (Perl, 
PHP, Python). Is this one of those Smalltalkism? What is the 
idiomatic testing for empty strings, zeroes, or other "false" values?

#!/usr/bin/ruby

for o in [true, false, '', [], {}, 0, 0.0, '0', ' ', nil]
   print o.inspect," is "
   if o
     puts true
   else
     puts false
   end
end

Regards,
Steve