[Python-ideas] Please reconsider the Boolean evaluation of midnight

[Donald Stufft]

On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:43 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On 6 Mar 2014 08:11, "Donald Stufft" <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> >
> > Most of those are pretty easy to reason about being “False”, they all have some
> > concept of empty, nothing, etc. Midnight however is not any more or less a time
> > than one minute past midnight. Even worse, if you consider not explicitly
> > checking for None a bug in that application code, debugging that code is made
> > much more difficult because of the fact that for some reason "midnight" is
> > considered False.
> >
> > That is the real problem here, sure people should be using ``is None`` checks
> > but until people are perfect and never write buggy code, we have to contend
> > with the fact that sometimes people will not write ``is None``. Making that
> > particular error harder to debug is doing nothing but wasting their time and
> > having Python be punitive for what in many cases may be a mistake.
> 
> Right, the core problem here is changing an often harmless style problem into a subtle behavioural bug. I changed the title on http://bugs.python.org/issue13936 accordingly, reopened it and described the appropriate next steps for anyone that is motivated enough about the issue to actually do the work.
> 
> We'll see if the enthusiasm for changing the behaviour translates into anyone being sufficiently interested to work out the details of the deprecation warning and the associated documentation and test updates.
> 
> Regards,
> Nick.
> 
> >
> > -----------------
> > Donald Stufft
> > PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
> >
> >
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Thanks Nick :)

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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