[wrs]

I’ve been involved with systems where 0xffff… was canonical “true”, but not something as specific as 7! If you’re going to turn on more bits, why not all of them? Though I think this was because the NOT instruction was used for logical inversion, so the bit flip theory doesn’t apply.

[cpeterso]

For example, the value of Visual Basic's "True" keyword is -1. This seems silly from the perspective of a C programmer, but -1 (0xffffffff) is "more true" than 1 because every bit is true, not just the LSB. :)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/langua...

[bilekas]

Even in VB there is a grain of rationale .. I never even considered before WHY it was -1.. I always just thought it was VB doing VB, but now I have gained +1 respect for Vb..

Edit: "Gained" no "Earned"

[marssaxman]

In the long-ago world where integers were commonly used as arrays of bit flags, it made perfect sense that True = Not False.

[layer8]

The OP still wanted to only type a single character.