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Imagining a language without booleans
- Aardwolf 1y agoSo basically, C before version C99
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoTechnically C23. _Bool is just a fancy substitute for unsigned char and "casting" with the !! sequence.
- Y_Y 1y agohttps://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Understanding_monads/Maybe https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Understanding_monads/M... This looks homeomorphic to the Maybe monad.
- nh23423fefe 1y agoisomorphic? homeo implies continuity
- Y_Y 1y agoAnd continuous inverse! I was just being silly, you're right of course.
- Retr0id 1y agofunny, I've been toying with the idea of a language with only booleans
- f1shy 1y agoWouldn’t that just be logic gates, Mealy and Moore machines written in text form?
- Retr0id 1y agoYes. Except, the language should be expressive enough that you can build abstractions and write "normal" code. And, the compiler should be smart enough to emit efficient native code for your target arch (and not doing FPGA-style hardware synthesis)
- zoky 1y agoWell, that’s true and false.
- seanhunter 1y agoImagine a language that not only doesn't have booleans, it only has positive fractions. It also doesn't have any keywords, yet it is Turing-complete. Struggling to imagine it? Don't worry. John H Conway has done it for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN
- entaloneralie 1y agoIn FRACTRAN, Bools is all you get. The value is 6 is a:true, b:true, c: false, d: false, etc.. I love fractran tho, I must have written a thousand lines of it this year alone.
- nh23423fefe 1y agoNot really without. More like obscured booleans, 2 embeds into T+1 which embeds into T+U. I mean C used the sign bit to do the same.
- brador 1y agoBooleans are a remnant of limited RAM. 2025, we can all just use integers and carry one less variable type in our sack. Next we replace integers with floats and we’re done. 3 birds, 1 stone.
- legacynl 1y agoWe could just use 2 integers for floats and not deal with inaccuracies. Even easier.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoFloats can represent faaar bigger span than two integers. 2*10^-308 to 2*10^+308 is gonna require you 1024 bits or 32 integers. Now those 32 integers would represent that value exactly instead of rounding a few decimals, but some maths prefer approximate large span over exact values.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago> Booleans are a remnant of limited RAM. I highly doubt that. Let's call a boolean that is represented as one bit "true boolean type" Since no instruction set (that i'm aware of) has boolean operators, a "true boolean" would require every operation on it to evaluate to multiple bit-wise operations, which take up registers and cycles. Flags in registers are "true boolean", but they're usually operated on explicitly like int with bit-wise operators. There is also the issue of bit alignment, atomic access, and stack and heap allocations being byte based; further restricting how a language that had "true booleans" would be able to actually be able to work with them. I know that there are some languages that allow boolean arrays to be packed tightly as "true boolean", but that is a rare exception. Even char and byte types has this issue sometimes, but are more commonly "properly packed". > we can all just use integers So it's all integers already. The most common implementation of boolean around is probably #define true 1 But we really should use enums more instead of boolean. "fail, success, bad_param, error_404" is equally efficient to return as a bool. > Next we replace integers with floats. No. (well python and JavaScript kinda does already, but no) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
- munificent 1y agoReally cool post. I've had roughly similar thoughts when noodling on my current hobby language [1], but didn't work all the way through it to see if it hangs together. It seems like it might! > Let me know if you’ve seen anything more similar. If you take static typing off the table, then Icon's goal-directed execution is very much an inspiration in this area. [1]: https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2023/01/03/type-checking-if-expressions/ https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2023/01/03/type-checking-...
- cryptonector 1y agoAnd Verse.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoWhich was mentioned in the original article.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoIcon was the first thing I thought of as well. I wonder about Prolog…
- zero_shift 1y agoNow that we have defined a language without booleans, we need some way to coalesce these optional values We ideally want an infix function that can reduce the "truthiness" of two values. Let us imagine this language is a Haskell-type-thing, and we can define pseudo-operators with pattern matching infixr 3 && (&&) :: Optional -> Optional -> Optional Empty && _ = Empty _ && Empty = Empty Some A && Some B = Some A _ && _ = Empty infixr 2 || Some || _ = Some None || Some = Some None || None = None _ || _ = None Hmm, let's see how that looks a = b && c d = e || f The good news is that we are free from the tyranny of booleans. The bad news is that we just reinvented JavaScript :-)
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoI honestly really like those two operators in js.
- melncat 1y agoDon't forget about ?? as well
- zero_shift 1y agoI'm a big fan of the Elvis operator myself (.?)
- chuckadams 1y ago.? is null-safe property access. Elvis is ?:
- zero_shift 1y agoOh, that makes more sense, because ?: has eyes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_operator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_operator ?:-)
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- legacynl 1y agoI don't really get it.. In one of the last example's he writes: ` if (node.last_child(s) is Ok(last_child))` Is the part between the () not ultimately the same as a boolean expression? Like he wrote his own implementation of if/else syntax? Also in the beginning he says: "An if with an else can produce a value", but isn't this just 'syntactic sugar'? I think the code that actually runs is the same as if you'd write if (value x = some_value) {value = something} else {value = something_else} ?
- myhf 1y agoThis concept doesn't require the Law of Excluded Middle that classical boolean values do.
- legacynl 1y agoAh alright, since I don't know what that is I will attribute it to my own lack of knowledge then.
- IAmBroom 1y agoBasically, the Excluded Middle is for things neither True nor False.
- legacynl 1y agoYeah okay I get it. The law basically states that 'not true' should be 'false' and vice versa. I still don't get what's the use of this, or is this just a curiosity? It seems like the result is just a kind of ternary operator? Doesn't this still just compile to if(x.present) return x else y? Just with really obtuse syntax
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- stonemetal12 1y agoIf you are doing proofs then the law of the excluded middle creates paradoxes. "this statement is false" is a paradox with the law but isn't without the law. In a programming language not used for proofs? Then yeah it is just for fun.
- asplake 1y agoPerhaps it’s cheating, but last I checked, Gleam has no “if”, only “match”. With that, and in languages with sum types, you can easily define your own boolean and boolean-adjacent types.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoIf null, you have booleans: null or not null. :)
- rhaps0dy 1y agoBasically Emacs Lisp. Where `nil` is the only falsy value, and anything else (including `t`, which analogizes to `Some(())`) are truthy values.
- nahumba 1y agoHeadline no bit. Then attack if. There would be no branching if there were no "if". It's basic assembly. Not jumps. No loops.
- 1718627440 1y agoYes, I think it really only works in a side-effect free language. Otherwise after the first "failure", while every resulting value also turns to None, allocation, file access, database calls still happen, so you are now in a weird limbo state where everything was done, but no handle retained and in a weird position in control flow, kind-of between the lines, which isn't expressed by any of your code.
- atq2119 1y agoThe operations could be short-circuiting.
- moltar 1y agoPerl
- weatherlight 1y agoI can. it's called Erlang. true an false are just atoms.
- jerf 1y agoUnfortunately, you're invariably going to end up with a "Some<false>" at some point, and you're going to spend the next 20 years explaining to people why that's not a wart in your language that your if "treats it as true", no matter how much you say "my language doesn't even have true so that's not a valid statement". It isn't going to matter that it's technically a "JSON::false" or whatever... you're still going to get people calling that a wart forever. ("But a JSON::false would be a None" - no, you need that for either "null" or "missing". A JSON library has to have an exposed "false" value to distinguish it from null and missing, both for input and output.) I'm not saying that doesn't mean to try this out, but as more of a heads up and something to talk about explicitly in the eventual tutorial. Personally, I find myself fairly satisfied with if statements rigidly requiring a boolean and refusing to have a concept of "truthiness", which I consider a mistake, and I'm not sure this is solving real problems I've had. A user can always write the Option vs. None themselves in an if statement with mandatory else if they want. This introduces a wrapper level of Option that may not always play nice in real code (I mean, a lot of sum type types essentially already have it built in with things like "type Color = Red | Blue | Green | Unspecified" where adjoining a None is often unnecessary) and may really tempt you towards a concept of truthiness that may be a bigger wart than when you're trying to fix. It's pretty hard for a computer programming language to essentially evict the concept of a "bit" from the language. I'm not sure it can be done in practice, but it's fun to think about it and I encourage the pondering.
- moritzwarhier 1y agoI admit I didn't read all of your commment. But is Some<false> different from Maybe<false> ? Is it a type-level construct to express a predicate like Array.prototype.some ? In any case, optional types containing boolean values are definitively an anti-pattern. And in cases where it's prudent to check for the "presence" of a property containing a Maybe<ObjectReference> , while using coercion, it does not make sense to distinguish false from "falsy". TypeScript's dynamic narrowing has become pretty comprehensive when it comes to this kind of issue. Still, Option<Boolean> types are bad in most contexts I think, especially in languages like JS. Instead of using boolean | undefined , I much prefer explicit defaults (parameters) or properties being declared every time (data).
- elcapitan 1y agoToo good to be true or false
- taylorallred 1y agoI love seeing these kinds of explorations in the realm of language design. I've wondered about expanding the notion of boolean operators like this. For all its flaws, one thing I've always liked about JS is the overloaded (||) and (&&) operators. It's really slick to write something like `foo.get_that_can_fail(x) || "default value"`.
- kazinator 1y ago> Can we go further Yes. we can get a Lisp background to get a better rounded and wiser perspective on all these topics.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoI'm pretty sure Ruby already does this. if statements are expressions that return a value and return nil if there is no else. (Also 0 == true in Ruby. Only false or nil are not true.)
- jayd16 1y agoIf you're looking to imagine a world without bools, do some branchless gpu shader coding. Certainly its a different way to think about processing data.
- zero_shift 1y agoI've also seen (non-GPU) programs use numbers with multiplication, instead of if-else, as a means of preventing CPU branch stalls. This technique is sometimes called branchless programming.
- nomel 1y ago> do some branchless gpu shader coding A mask array is just a bunch of boolean, and follows boolean math, because it is boolean values. A boolean type does not make a boolean value, it being two state does.
- jujube3 1y agoMost dialects of BASIC didn't have booleans. Everything old is new again.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoAnd most assembly languages don't have general-purpose booleans. And C89 doesn't have booleans. And FORTHs don't have booleans in the base interpreter, those are words defined like any other.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoMost BASIC dialects map booleans to integers with zero is false, non-zero is true and -1 is the canonical true result of boolean operators, so I think they effectively have booleans.
- cryptonector 1y agoThis: bool = nil?nil true = Ok(nil) false = Err(nil) is still booleans. Icon and Verse use failure (backtracking!) as false and all values as true, but you still have conditionals and boolean logic even though you don't (or may not) have a boolean type.
- Twey 1y agoDefinitely a fun alternative-history! It's a nice take to see `Option`s or `Result`s as a step towards logic programming. Typically once you introduce loops you need to have a way to combine `E`s; the way to represent an ordered set of things e.g. to be combined is to return a list of things, and then you're in logic programming world. [1] [1]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Logic_programming_example https://wiki.haskell.org/Logic_programming_example It's a bit weird to me that the result `not` discards the content of the value rather than just swapping its truthiness (not A?E : E?A). > The closest thing I’ve seen is fallible expressions in Verse, but those are pretty different because they (i) don’t assign a value to an if without an else, and (ii) involve speculative execution. Traditional ifs, and the ifs here, also involve speculative execution :) (i.e. execution that happens regardless of which branch you end up on). It's just delimited by the brackets of the if condition (a ‘failure context’ in Verseland). It's true that traditionally logic languages don't assign a value to failure. I guess algebraic effects (of which `Result` can be an example) can be seen as a generalization of failure in that way. Amr Sabry &a. also have an interesting notion of ‘failure with value’ as the semantics of their negative types: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3434290 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3434290 , http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4964 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4964 (LtU for an older paper from the programme).
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