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

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Sat, 09 Mar 2002 22:14:29 -0500

You started this game and asked for these many arguments :-)

OK, I've played enough. :-)

My only objection is overriding the str method. Everything else is just fine.

Good.

You don't have a boolean type in the sense of algebra, but we can't change that due to Python's history and a true algebraic boolean type can easily be written as extension, so it doesn't worry me much.

Agreed. There's only so much we can do without applying the time machine to 12 years of code developed by 100,000s of people.

Hmm, perhaps you should name the type "truth" or "truthvalue" rather than boolean.

Yuck. It's called bool (or Boolean) everywhere else, even when the semantics are defined to be just different names for 0 and 1. I don't like to innovate here.

Could be... I don't like it when things are broken on purpose just to have an interactive session return "nice" output. I also don't like scanning tons of code to find the few instances where this change breaks application interop.

There must be other ways to satisfy your requirements and mine.

We'll see. I'm flexible.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)