[Python-Dev] For review: PEP 285: Adding a bool type

[Guido van Rossum]

> The effort required to do this is not the argument,
> it's the fact that you are trying to break working code 
> without any real life need. The PEP doesn't mention a
> single example where the advantage is so obvious that
> it requires breaking code.

OK, now we're talking.  You want more motivation.  See my response to
David Ascher; I'm going to add all that to the PEP online too.

> > > I'd be happy with repr(True) giving me 'True',
> > > but not str(True).
> > 
> > It just seems to make more sense if booleans print as True and False.
> > But if that really is going to be the only place where things break,
> > I'm willing to reconsider this.
> 
> Good.

This is now in the PEP as an option.

> The problem is that the boolean output may not have been 
> intended by the programmer. All he ever got was the integers
> 1 and 0 -- it was never obvious to the pure Python programmer
> that these two values were acutally the singletons
> Py_True and Py_False. Now you want to add additional
> semantics to those and things will look different on output.

In the long run, you'll thank me for this.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)