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I'll give you that one! It's an old mistake and not very costly in practice, but the intuitive rightness isn't worth the pain in the butt. But the pain in the butt also isn't painful enough to match the difficulty of fixing it.

I actually got this bad idea from Unix: !strcmp(), etc. It's certainly easier to overload error codes into a 0=true scheme, although Urbit doesn't actually do that.



"It's an old mistake and not very costly in practice, but the intuitive rightness isn't worth the pain in the butt."

Why is it intuitively right?


"a string can be slack in many ways, but taut in only one"

0 is true, everything else is false. At least that's my intuition.


Huh! Pretty similar to my comparison to Tolstoy's quote on happy and unhappy families.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10282933




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