On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 01:22:06PM -0600, Rod Adams wrote:
: Larry Wall wrote:
:
: >On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 12:28:15PM -0700, Marcus Adair wrote:
: >: Isn't saying "false doesn't exist" like saying, "dark doesn't exist"?
: >: Why have a word for that?
: >:
: >: I'm really afraid I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm worried
: >: that neither "whether" nor "indeed" work very well in many contexts. It
: >: seems to me that testing trueness exists in so many contexts that it's
: >: going to be hard to find an English word that fits all the important
: >: ones.
: >
: >Most of those contexts are implicitly boolean, and this function would
: >be redundant there. The main use for this function is to provide a
: >boolean context for its argument and return 0 or 1 when you really
: >do want 0 or 1 for some context that isn't directly boolean. This
: >is actually relatively rare.
: >
: >
: Doesn't C< +?(...) > take care of those cases?
:
: Sure, it's line noise, but do we really need a new keyword for something
: that's "relatively rare"?
: Especially when that keyword is likely to confuse people a lot more than
: the application of two unary operators?
Well, sure, but by a similar argument we don't need "not", "and", or
"or" either. I think an acknowledgement of its rarity could show up
in making it something relatively long like "whether". On the other
hand, I have a linguistic problem with "whether" in that in English
it seems to be looser than "and", and "or", while as a "positive not"
in Perl, it would be classified as tighter. That is,
$x = whether $a or $b;
$x = not $a or $b;
would actually be parsed as
$x = whether($a) or $b;
$x = not($a) or $b;
whereas as a native English speaker would probably expect
$x = whether($a or $b);
So I'm thinking we'll just go back to "true", both for that reason,
and because it does syntactically block the naughty meaning of true as
a term (as long as we don't default true() to $_), as Luke reminded us.
Larry
