Project Elvis

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 30 October 2017 at 19:51:30 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> Yeah. Honestly, I stay away from if(x) in general if x isn't a 
> bool.

That's the best option, even for ints. The proper way to cast to 
bool is to be explicit. A lot of the shorthand in C probably had 
to do with early CRTs not being able to display a lot of text. At 
this day and age readability (easy to scan quickly) should be 
more important than terseness.

> The fact that NaN == NaN is false and yet cast(bool)NaN is true 
> though is just attrocious though. We aren't source compatible 
> with C like C++ is, and yet we're still bound by it in so many 
> small, stupid ways - largely because of the risk of ported code 
> going badly.

I think some of the float semantics aren't in the standard, but 
in IEEE754. But many languages have picked up many of C's 
not-so-great design characteristics. I think largely because 
people who write their own compilers tend to program in C… so 
more cultural than rational.