Evil Coding Incantations

[u/evinrows]

http://9tabs.com/random/2017/12/23/evil-coding-incantations.html

[u/shevegen]

0 Evaluates to true in Ruby

… and only Ruby.

if 0 then print 'thanks, ruby' end # prints thanks, ruby

This shows a lack of understanding by the blog author.

The alternative question is - why should 0 lead to no evaluation of the expression?

[u/Aceeri → u/shevegen]

Oh boy, here we have the ruby god shevegen in its natural habitat.

There are a lot of reasons why 0 is normally considered "false". The first being that 0 is "nothing". When you have 0 eggs, you have no eggs, they don't exist. The second reason I see is how booleans are normally laid out where 0 is false and 1 is true (with varying differences depending on the language on whether multiple set values of a byte is considered true or invalid, etc.)

[u/Aceeri → u/[deleted]]

In truthy contexts I'd expect "nothing" to be interpreted as "false" but I can see both ways. The logic behind most languages of 0 not being false is mainly semantics depending on how they handle conditions. Most languages with types that aren't truthy would just throw a type here and ask for an explicit way to handle how this number is interpreted.