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Re: s/true/better name/

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From:
Rod Adams
Date:
March 16, 2005 11:22
Subject:
Re: s/true/better name/
Message ID:
4238875E.7030904@rodadams.net
Larry Wall wrote:

>On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 12:28:15PM -0700, Marcus Adair wrote:
>: Isn't saying "false doesn't exist" like saying, "dark doesn't exist"? 
>: Why have a word for that?
>: 
>: I'm really afraid I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm worried 
>: that neither "whether" nor "indeed" work very well in many contexts. It 
>: seems to me that testing trueness exists in so many contexts that it's 
>: going to be hard to find an English word that fits all the important 
>: ones.
>
>Most of those contexts are implicitly boolean, and this function would
>be redundant there.  The main use for this function is to provide a
>boolean context for its argument and return 0 or 1 when you really
>do want 0 or 1 for some context that isn't directly boolean.  This
>is actually relatively rare.
>  
>
Doesn't  C< +?(...) > take care of those cases?

Sure, it's line noise, but do we really need a new keyword for something 
that's "relatively rare"?
Especially when that keyword is likely to confuse people a lot more than 
the application of two unary operators?

 
-- Rod Adams


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