5 ms·

I guess you mean the opposite hasn't prevented Ruby from being popular. All numeric values are truthy, including 0.

• koenigdavidmj 15y ago
  A lot of Ruby idiomatic methods will return either a value or nil, which is falsey, so things like: x = meep if x # do stuff end will run as most might mean.
• pyre 15y ago
  > I guess you mean the opposite hasn't > prevented Ruby from being popular. I was stating something more like "the fact that there is a hard split between numbers and booleans, and everything -- barring null -- by default evaluates to true." Since everything is a object instance in Ruby, asserting a variable is basically only evaluating whether or not it is null.
  • dlitz 15y ago
    null or false, actually.
    • pyre 15y ago
      Slip of the tongue. ;) But the easiest way to think about it is something like: type(x) == Boolean ? x == True : x != nil Disclaimer: That may not be valid Ruby, as I only have a passing knowledge of some bits of Ruby.