question about True values

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:19:59 +0000, John Salerno wrote:

> Oh!!! I get it now! I was thinking that
> 
> if s
> 
> was the same as
> 
> if s == True

No. But you know that now :)

> because I know sometimes you can write if statements this way (though 
> it's wordy). 

You can, but shouldn't.


> But what I didn't realize was that in the cases I was 
> thinking of, 's' was an expression that evaluated to a boolean value, 
> not an actual value of some other type!
> 
> So I suppose
> 
> if (10 > 5)

Is the same as:

if True

because (10 > 5) evaluates as True.

 
> would be the same as
> 
> if (10 > 5) == True

Did you mean

if (10 > 5) == True == True

or 

if (10 > 5) == True == True == True

or even 

if (10 > 5) == True == True == True == True

I hope you see my point now.


> because (10 > 5) does evaluate to "True".

I think it is a good time to remind people of some extremely well-thought
out opposition to the introduction of bools to Python from Laura Creighton:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-April/095878.html

She lost the debate, Guido had the final word and Python now has bools.
Take particular note of her description of Python distinguishing between
Something ("cat", 4, [0, 1, 2] etc) and Nothing ("", 0, [] etc).



-- 
Steven.