[jjgreen]

Possible application: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_

[benj111]

Off the top of my head. Compilers. You may know that a value has known 1s and 0s and unknowns. This would allow you to represent that for optimisation purposes.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Arturo[0] language supports true,false and maybe. I really liked that idea actually, worth mentioning here.

so valid arturo code can be like (picked from their in-a-nutshell documentation)

i1: true

i2: false

i3: maybe

[0]: https://arturo-lang.io/documentation/in-a-nutshell

[taneq]

Everyone hates null but (in database land, and arguably in other programming) it just means “no data.”

(As an aside, I found the characterisation of null as being a “billion dollar mistake” to be unfair. Those who don’t acknowledge null are doomed to reimplement it, probably poorly, or to have the unknowns in their logic remain unknown unknowns.)

[mcherm]

The "mistake" was not in providing a way to represent "no data", it was in providing no way to represent "this definitely HAS" data.

Languages that correct the problem have two separate types (eg: Foo & Option<Foo>) meaning "definitely a Foo" and "a Foo but it might have no data". Java just has Foo, meaning "a Foo but it might have no data" but no way to represent "definitely a Foo".

[woadwarrior01]

I've seen this pattern repeated in a number of large production codebases using optional booleans.

[hahahaa]

I want an LLM trained on dailywtf code

[mi_lk]

Had a good chuckle

[abcd_f]

If it weren't for Bool as a name, that's just 0 for OK, non-zero for errors with 1 being general failure.

[inigyou]

TDWTF code is usually hyperbolized. It might not have been called Bool.

[WorldMaker]

But also it could have been found in the wild in C/C++ code, which both had no "native" Boolean type until surprisingly recently (C++17 and C23! as in 2017 and 2023 standards, irrespectively) so Bool is very much a possible real name and not part of the hyperbole.