Booleans (was: Conditional operator in Python?)

[Alex Martelli]

"Russell E. Owen" <owen at astrono.junkwashington.emu> wrote in message
news:9acvud$uk6$1 at nntp6.u.washington.edu...
    [snip]
> anything except code that already used these as names. I suspect most
> folks are not foolish enough to code with "true" or "false" (unless they

Are you perchance assuming that everybody's variable names are
in English...?

> Regarding your boolean class, could you explain the value to adding
> "don't know" to it? I can imagine it has its uses, but it sounds like a
> different problem domain than standard conditional logic such as
> if/then/else. If you're aiming for fuzz logic then presumably you'd want

Standard SQL adds a "don't know/not applicable" value (NULL) to
_every_ datatype, including booleans.  It's really a must to handle
masses of data collected in the real world, as some 'holes' due to
imperfect data-collection remains most often, and using an otherwise
permissible data-value to map "don't know" is pernicious (most
particularly for data-types wit few permissible values -- boolean
is a sort of worst-case here!-).


Alex