From: djberg96@... (Daniel Berger)
Date: 2003-07-15T12:14:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Booleans

"Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@mail.com> wrote in message news:<20030714214600.GB23895@mulan.thereeds.org>...
> 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

That was part of the reason I submitted RCR #143 (on RubyGarden)
which, unfortunately, was rejected.  Care to revive it?

Dan