April 3, 2002
3:49 p.m.
From: "Guido van Rossum" <guido@python.org>
False and True are numbers, and they are equal (==) to 0 and 1; everything else follows from there.
FWIW, that's the way it is in C++, and almost all of the same conclusions fall out of it. Also, as distasteful as it may seem intellectually, I have yet to hear any complaints about this situation in practice... so it seems to work out OK. I also note that this is not something people seem to have trouble with in making the transition from C to C++, which is analogous to the problem of legacy 1/0 code. -Dave