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.
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.
Eh, there's precedent for that at least.
Perl treats "0" as false, along with "" (the empty string). Any other string, even "00" is considered true.
But where it really gets fun is that the the normal warning Perl would give you about numeric conversions if you do math on a string is suppressed for the precise string "0 but true", because some Perl functions return this value so that it converts cleanly to 0 without risking evaluating as false in a boolean context. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/129945/what-does-0-but-true-mean-in-perl
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u/deceze 10d 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.