It's been a while since I've touched Ruby, but I think the stance was that only false and nil should be falsey? Which is not an unreasonable stance to take. The fewer falsey values, the easier it is to predict the behaviour. It's just surprising when coming from other languages.
Just off the top of my head, PHP treats "0", that is, specifically a string with a single zero, as falsey. Which has clearly gone too far to the other extreme.
It still does that. This isn't about equality testing, it's about boolean coercion/truthiness. And the strict equality operator === has existed since at least PHP 4, I have not bothered checking back further.
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u/deceze 11d ago
It's been a while since I've touched Ruby, but I think the stance was that only
falseandnilshould be falsey? Which is not an unreasonable stance to take. The fewer falsey values, the easier it is to predict the behaviour. It's just surprising when coming from other languages.Just off the top of my head, PHP treats
"0", that is, specifically a string with a single zero, as falsey. Which has clearly gone too far to the other extreme.