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

Alexander Belopolsky alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com
Thu Mar 6 00:22:54 CET 2014


On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> And yet 0 is False not because it starts the positive real numbers (not
> sure
> what that has to do with a value in an integer type) but because it
> signifies
> an empty or zero magnitude object.
>

No.  It is False because it equals False:

>>> 0 == False
True

Numbers are not containers.  You cannot tell whether a number is empty or
not.  Python interpretation of numbers in boolean context is different from
that of containers.

I think the disagreement stems from different view on what time-of-day is.
 For me, it is the fraction of the day that passed or distance from
midnight and in any case fundamentally some kind of number expressed in a
Babylonian base-60 notation.

I think proponents of bool(time(0)) == True view it as a container of
hours, minutes and seconds.
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