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PEP 308: "then" "else" for deprecating "and" "or" side effects

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Fri Feb 14 00:58:23 EST 2003 
Christian Tismer wrote:

> Due to the presence of a real boolean type, we
> should ask ourselves if "and" and "or" shouldn't be
> deprecated in their current meaning, towards being
> "boolean only"?

No, I don't think so.  Their use is already too well-entrenched to want
to do something like this.

> "and" and "or" are behaving like logical operators.
> They happen to do this by not providing a plain
> truth value, but by promoting one of their operands.

They _are_ logical operators.  They just do their logical by returning
one of the objects, rather than a strict Boolean.  Other languages do
this, like Lisp; there's nothing inherently wrong with it.  It's also
way too entrenched to change now.  It's an example of a feature that I
don't often rely on, but even I, a champion of the Booleans PEP,
wouldn't think to change their behavior now.

-- 
 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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