And so that we could stop treating 1 as true. The only real argument for type coersion is convenience. I don't see how it's more convenient to treat 0 as true rather than false.
If we take coercion as a given, what if your conditional is the index of an element in an array? If it doesn’t find it, it returns nil (which is falsey). If it’s the first element, it returns 0. Shouldn’t that be truthy?
index != nil should be true. If they really designed the language to simplify that specific scenario (using the index to check that an element exists in an array) it sounds even crazier to me.
I mean, you can easily find scenarios where the opposite would be more convenient (e.g. if you want to check that a string is not empty by using its length).
Yes. I'm not really a Ruby guy but after reading up I can see how it's more convenient to treat 0 as truthy in that lang. in js you never use findIndex since find is just better.
Temperatures do stop at 0 if you're using the correct unit. ;)
But yeah I agree with you. There's always some level of ambiguity caused by coersion. Even treating nil and false the same for a boolean is technically wrong, but we can accept the ambiguity for the sake of convenience.
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u/ReefNixon 20h ago
We invented boolean types so that we could stop treating 0 as false.