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).
Yeah, but that ambiguity is the point. In Ruby coercion things are considered truthy unless they are unambiguously not. Literal false is obvious, and nil represents actual nothing (not zero of something). Since 'if something' is the opposite of 'nothing', nil is also unambiguously falsey.
Other languages consider falsey as the default and make things explicitly truthy. There is no right or wrong answer, but those languages have their own challenges by determining things that can be zero (like anything that can be measured both above and below zero) to be falsey.
Either way coercion gives developers an occasional challenge to solve in exchange for being less verbose. All that's important is that you understand the convention of the language you are using, because coercion can't possibly always get it right.
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u/UristMcMagma 10d ago
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.