On 5 March 2014 13:53, Shai Berger
then, in a few years, people can go back to writing "if event.start_time" like they do with dates and datetimes.
Why on earth would they do that? It's still bad practice. If you're using None as a sentinel, you should test for it explicitly. Nobody has yet suggested any other use case where this matters.
Again, I'm not saying the current behaviour is sensible, but I doubt the work to fix it will benefit anyone in practice.
So, you support my other suggestion -- a warning on every use of bool(time)?
No. Good programming practice should cover that. We don't warn in other cases where programmers make silly coding errors. Look at Skip's message - should we also warn on uses of bool(int) because people can write bad code that fails to work properly with zero, as well?
Also, the work to fix it is probably less than the work invested in this discussion so far...
That is not obvious (given documentation, release management, etc, costs).
In any case, if we all agree that http://bugs.python.org/issue13936 is a valid problem -- can we re-open it, and then discuss how (or if) we solve it?
We don't. Can we agree that it's not a bug and abandon this fruitless discussion? Paul