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

Hans Nowak wurmy@earthlink.net
Fri, 8 Mar 2002 13:12:25 -0500

This may be a minor issue, but this proposal will break code like

days_feb = 28 + isleapyear(year)

assuming that booleans cannot be added to ints. :-)

isleapyear can be defined like this:

return year % 4 == 0 and (year % 100 != 0 or year % 400 == 0)

like it is in calendar.py. In the new situation it would return a boolean. Now I realize that code using isleapyear this way is easily fixed (especially if we would be able say int(True) or int(False) to get the numerical value again), but my point is, it takes away a (IMHO) nice side effect of using these values as numbers.

I'm not sure if there's a lot of code out there that actually uses these numerical values. I occasionally use it, though... I guess that's what I get for bad programming practices. :-)

--Hans Nowak (vaporeon@wanadoo.nl) http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/