[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 285: Adding a bool type (original) (raw)

Andrew Koenig ark@research.att.com
03 Apr 2002 23:08:12 -0500

David> FWIW, that's the way it is in C++, and almost all of the same David> conclusions fall out of it. Also, as distasteful as it may seem David> intellectually, I have yet to hear any complaints about this David> situation in practice... so it seems to work out OK.

It seems only fair that I should mention a complaint: The fact that bool is an integral type makes it necessary to have operator const void* rather than operator bool as members of istream and ostream for end-of-file testing. Otherwise, writing cin << x'' instead of cin >> x'' by mistake would result in converting cin to bool and thence to int, shifting the result right by x bits, and throwing it away.

-- Andrew Koenig, ark@research.att.com, http://www.research.att.com/info/ark