C treats 0 as falsy so I would say that its more likely that Pythons behaviour is based on it - the Ruby and Clojure way has more to do with Scheme > That bein

C treats 0 as falsy so I would say that its more likely that Pythons behaviour is based on it - the Ruby and Clojure way has more to do with Scheme > That being said, what's the point of having nil and false? Seems a bit redundant to me. In some languages, like Common Lisp, nil and false are the same thing. However, it can be useful to separate the "this is a false value" from "this value does not exist", specially in a dynamically typed language. For example, in Lua you get a "nil" if you access a table field that does not exist and you delete a table field if you store null to it. Before they added a separate boolean type, it was really annoying to work with boolean arrays because storing nil in the array would make it full of holes and would confuse most library functions.