[Python-Dev] bool conversion wart? (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Fri Feb 23 22:27:12 CET 2007

Greg Ewing schrieb:

But bool isn't really a numeric type in the same way that the others are. It's only a subtype of int for historical reasons. If it had been a part of Python from the beginning, it probably would have been a separate type altogether.

Hmmm... is that something that should be revisited in 3.0?

I specifically asked the question when unifying ints and longs for 3.0 (as int went away, the question was what True and False ought to be). Guido pronounced that it is deliberate that they are "integer-like", and should continue to inherit from the integer type.

One idiom that people use a lot is foo[b], where b is a boolean.

Regards, Martin

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