[MAL]
Right, but my point is that if you want to make booleans first class objects in Python, you should consider making them behave as defined in the text books rather than trying to make them feel like integers but look like truth values.
[me]
I reject this reasoning. Python is not trying to follow the text books. (In fact, maybe I should say "Python is trying not to follow the text books.")
[MAL]
Uhm, I can't follow you here -- which text books you are talking about here (Python has always tried to conform to standards in most areas).
The textbooks that say that a Boolean value does not support arithmetic operations. In tis discussion several people have tried to argue for such bools and claimed that that is the textbook definition.
FWIW, I was talking about the text books students use to learn boolean algebra.
I don't think Boolean algebra is a big subject. I bet that most people only learn about it explicitly when they learn computer programming.
BTW, I wonder why you didn't follow up on my other comments...
This thread is way too long to comment on everything. I probably felt that I'd already responded to the same issue in a different message. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)