I think it's better to not imply false statements by radamar · Pull Request #6343 · python/cpython (original) (raw)

I hope this review serves to educate. While the change seems innocuous, it includes one example of a bad idiom that I have seen repeated many times.

Testing equality against a global singleton is bad, testing equality against boolean literal is worse. The statement:

implies nothing about the type stored in this variable, and is NOT equivalent to the statement:

 if the_world_is_flat == True:

There is the concept of "truthieness" of any value, 0, None, 0.0, and False will not evaluate to "truth", conversely nonzero numbers will.