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by api 3646 days ago
0 == true is also used in C error return values, where nonzero means "false" as in "did not succeed." So it's not without precedent.

It's not a terrible idea. In most types of computing there's often only one way for something to be true but N ways for it to be false.

1 comments

This is really not the case.

The C language and the standard library are distinct things. C originally did not define any values at all for booleans (true / false), but later implementations did and even in the oldest C compilers (0 == 0) would evaluate to '1', which caused the most repeated lines of C preprocessor input ever written:

#define TRUE 1 #define FALSE 0

Guarded by some #ifdefs if your compiler supported that.

Some standard library functions return nonzero on error (which can be < 0 or > 0), zero on 'success' which is not the same as true, and others (annoyingly) return 1 on 'success' or 'true' (such as the isalpha function/macro).