Re: Conversion to generic boolean

Andrew Morton
2006-08-29T15:47:34Z

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:45:02 +0100
Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 05:18:04PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > At present we have >50 different definitions of TRUE and gawd knows how
> > many private implementations of various flavours of bool.
> >
> > In that context, Richard's approach of giving the kernel a single
> > implementation of bool/true/false and then converting things over to use it
> > makes sense. The other approach would be to go through and nuke the lot,
> > convert them to open-coded 0/1.
> >
> > I'm not particularly fussed either way, really. But the present situation
> > is nuts.
>
> Let's start to kill all those utterly silly if (x == true) and if (x == false)
> into if (x) and if (!x) and pospone the type decision. Adding a bool type
> only makes sense if we have any kind of static typechecking that no one
> ever assign an invalid type to it.

Not really. bool/true/false have readability advantages over int/1/0.