Data Types

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Thu, 22 Sep 2016 01:46 pm, Sayth Renshaw wrote:

> What about 0 or 1 they are true and false like no other numbers? what
> category do they fall in with regards to booleans?

0 and 1 are ints:

py> type(0)
<class 'int'>
py> type(1)
<class 'int'>


just like 2, 3, 4, -1, -999, 1098765432 etc.

But just like 1 == 1.0 (a float), and 0 == 0.0 (a float), and in fact 1 also
equals Fraction(1, 1) and Decimal(1) and 1+0j (complex number), so 1 also
equals the bool True and 0 equals the bool False.

The reason for this is that in many programming languages, there are no
boolean values. People use 0 for false and 1 (or sometimes -1) for true. In
the early days, Python was the same.

See https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0285/ for more details.




-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.