Issue #7978 has been updated by alexeymuranov (Alexey Muranov). phluid61 (Matthew Kerwin) wrote: > funny_falcon (Yura Sokolov) wrote: > > Well, yes: ruby is not C and false is not 0. But why false could not be > > converted to 0 by #to_i ? > > That seems to imply that the reverse should hold, but (({!!0 => true})). 1. I do not think there is a rule that such fuzzy typecasting in Ruby has to be invertible: "".to_i.to_s # => "0" 2. !!x is not one of Ruby type casting methods. If Ruby had a function Boolean(x), it would be natural to define it as !!x, but each class would need to define its own typecasting method. In my opinion, 0.to_b would have to be false. > > Similarly, why should true.to_i return 1, and not -1 (as in Visual Basic) or 43 or 0 (which is also a truthy value)? 3. 1 is simpler than 43 or -1. This is the usual convention of boolean algebra that 0 cannot be false and 1 is true. The logical AND becomes simply the multiplication (mod 2). If it is false that you have some object, you have 0 of it. :) ---------------------------------------- Feature #7978: boolean to_i https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7978#change-37170 Author: alexeymuranov (Alexey Muranov) Status: Rejected Priority: Normal Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto) Category: core Target version: next minor =begin The current behavior is the following: > nil.to_i => 0 > false.to_i NoMethodError: undefined method `to_i' for false:FalseClass > true.to_i NoMethodError: undefined method `to_i' for true:TrueClass This does not look very consistent to me. I think it could be useful to define (({false.to_i})) as 0 and (({true.to_i})) as 1. I think those are fairly common numeric values for False and True. These values as strings "0" and "1" are also commonly used in HTML forms to represent boolean values. =end -- http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/