DMD 0.148 release

[Deewiant]

Ivan Senji wrote:
> Deewiant wrote:
>> Ivan Senji wrote:
>>
>>> One more thing. I heared from a Ruby user that in Ruby 0 means true.
>>
>>
>> To clarify, since that makes it sound a bit too much like "...and 1 means
>> false": in Ruby the only two things that are false are, of course,
>> false itself,
>> and nil, which is similar to D's null. 0, like all other numbers, is
>> true.
> 
> Thanks for the clarification. It is really interesting how Ruby takes a
> completly different approach. Not that I agree with it. Strange and
> arbitrary decision IMO to make all numbers true. Why not make all
> numbers false?
> 

Probably because of Ruby's TIMTOWTDI approach - There Is More Than One Way To Do
It. Thus, it tries to cater to programmers of all languages - including C, and
so if you liked to write "while (1)" before you can still write "while (1)". You
can also write "loop do", "for (;;)", "while (true)", and probably do the same
thing in at least a dozen other ways.

Point being that Ruby has no reason - and it might even be against its idioms -
to take so clearly a deviant approach to true and false as to declare numbers
false, when in most languages people nowadays use everything apart from 0 is true.

Why, then, 0 is true, I cannot say; probably because all other numbers are true,
and 0 has no need to be an exception. It might be true in other languages
because they are strongly typed (or at least somewhat strongly - C isn't that
strongly typed, and even in D pointer arithmetic can do quite a bit to break the
type system, AFAIK), and a "false" value is very handy for a function that
returns an integer. In Ruby, you can just return false or nil, whichever is
appropriate, on error, even if the method in question normally returns an integer.