OpenEuphoria

Re: request for change of boolean

• Posted by Matt Lewis <matthewwalkerlewis at gm?il.c?m> Dec 06, 2007
• 836 views

Kat wrote:
> 
> I liked the way bool and bytebool worked and evaluated in Pascal. Rather
> like common sense, or a checkbook. If the value was positive, any value,
> then it was there, money was in the checkbook, it was TRUE. If it was
> negative or zero, it was not there, there was no money, and it evaluated
> to FALSE. Somehow, it makes sense to me that Eu would have extended that
> to sequences (so {0,0,0,-300} = false, while {0,0,5000,0} is true). In 
> reality, it seems to be not only flamebait on my butt, but a great example
> of why it's a good idea to NOT provide specific code to illustrate a point.

First, I didn't think that your post was flamebait, nor do I think that
Derek did, based on his response.  My impression was that he

* considered your proposal
* asked for some more background to understand the motivation behind
  your request
* offered a work around for the specific case you mentioned
* discussed the reasoning behind the functioning of open()
* offered another work around

Then Juergen commented on Derek's post (that one doesn't strike me as a
flame, either).

CChris kinda agreed with you, and showed you how he works around it, then
offered another work around.

As I can rarely resist, I'll offer my own 2 cents on the topic.  There are
languages that treat -1 as TRUE and 0 as false.  This makes more sense when
you look at them bitwise--all bits either on or all bits off.

Whatever the merits may be for changing the truth evaluation in euphoria,
it would likely break a lot of code, so there'd better be a real good 
reason behind it.  And I doubt that "not having to type 'var >= 0'"
would make the cut.

Obviously, you could write a function that would return 1 or 0 based on
your description of PASCAL.

Matt