Hacker News Reader

Comment by graue | Hacker News Reader

1 and 2 both evaluate to true, yet they're not the same thing, so the comparison `1 == 2` is false. Is that equally problematic to you?

There's no way to avoid this problem in any language that allows coercing a number to a boolean. There are two possible boolean values, and many more possible numeric values. Therefore, numbers that are different and compare unequal will still both evaluate to true. Pigeonhole principle.

It seems you were surprised by the fact that Lua doesn't consider 0 false. Fair enough, that behavior's different from many other programming languages. But there's nothing inconsistent about it.

View on HN

You're explaining the implementation, which I understand. There are reasons behind everything in the infamous "Wat!" video. The inconsistency is in conceptual expectations: (0) is true, (not 0) is false, yet (0 == true) is false. These are unexpected "gotchas" familiar to experienced Lua programmers.

It's not a dealbreaker. It's just a Lua quirk that often surprises newcomers. I was pointing out that Squirrel uses more conventional boolean evaluation that script authors coming from other languages may be more comfortable with. If you're exposing a scripting API, the language you use is essentially a part of your user interface.

Lua's behavior here is identical to Ruby's, where 0 is also a truthy value:

    $ irb
    irb(main):001:0> if 0 then puts "0 is truthy!" end
    0 is truthy!
    => nil
    irb(main):002:0> if (not 0) then puts "(not 0) is truthy" end
    => nil
    irb(main):003:0> if (0 == true) then puts "0 is equal to true" end
    => nil

Many things about many programming languages are surprising to newcomers. However, the rule is very simple (in Lua): In a boolean context, every value besides nil and false is treated as though it were true. It is absolutely consistent. (a == b) is not a boolean context, or else 2 == 3 would be true.

Are you confusing (1==true) with (1 and true)? The value 1 is a number while true is a Boolean. Why should apple==orange ever be true?

As long as (0) and (not 0) are opposites; and (1) and (not 1) are opposites, there is nothing wrong, inconsistent or surprising.

But I think I see what you are trying to say. You want the == operator to coerce its operands to the same type before comparing (like JavaScript's == operator), but Lua's == operator doesn't do that, it simply compares. And that's why other languages need an === operator and Lua does not.

(JavaScript, by the way is the inconsistent one in this regard: the == operator does coerce its operands, but if(something == true) doesn't do the same thing as if(something). Try it with an empty array)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com