>Why not do `x == False` then Because it's no more explicit than "not x" and because it's 5 characters longer. There's always a trade off to be made between c

>Why not do `x == False` then Because it's no more explicit than "not x" and because it's 5 characters longer. There's always a trade off to be made between clarity and verbosity. Judging by the number of bugs I've squashed caused by the developer either not realizing or simply forgetting that ("", 0, 0.0, midnight, False, [], {}, None) all resolve to false, I've come to believe this is one of those times where the clarity should probably take precedence. You can go to the other extreme by making everything explicitly statically typed which will make your code much more verbose (e.g. see Java). I believe that trade off isn't worth it either, despite the small increase in type safety.