From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
Date: 2003-07-15T06:52:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Booleans

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 06:17:46AM +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 05:34:02 +0900, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> >?I would also be happy if the test for falseness was less simplistic 
> >?than "false is false, nil is false, everything else is true". ?I am 
> >?constantly being bitten by the fact that 0 is true.
> 
> If you *know* that you will be getting a Fixnum in response,
> you can use Fixnum#nonzero? and Fixnum#zero? to get the tests that
> you're after.

Sure.  Or just plain old != 0.  But I always forget that I need to do
anything at all beyond "if (expression returning Numeric)".  After
20 years programming C and derivatives, I have simply internalized
that zero is SUPPOSED to be false, dagnabit!

But I do think it would be worthwhile to allow classes to specify
their own truth values, even if Ruby as shipped doesn't take advantage
of this feature.

-Mark