I should pay attention to the comp.lang.python mailing list more often, but Usenet newsgroups seem to be a much bigger pain in the ass in these days of Broadband - it's hard to know whether your provider, or your providers provider, will really offer any usenet service.
Anyways,
PEP 285 brings about
True and
False to the Python language as natural members for the first time. One of the areas this will help in is the reduction of code like this:
return not not foo #the twin 'not not' keywords cast foo into a boolean statementand replace it with:
return bool(foo)Which, while brief, avoids the headslam that boolean logic games like 'not not' can be. One place this will be especially beneficial is with XML-RPC and SOAP, and other means of communicating with languages that have (and expect!) booleans. It's been sufficient so far in Python to use any true value or any false value for boolean use, and 1 and 0 for basic usage, but that's hard to communicate over the wire. A Python function may return '1' as an integer value. But it can also be returning '1' to indicate truth (as in predicates like 'isinstance()').
So... Interesting. Never even knew it was up for debate, let alone accepted.