Re: Expression statements

[David Manura <dm.lua@...>]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Wesley Smith <wesley.hoke@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Peyman <peiman_3009@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>... in many langs 0 and null string have false value.
>
> In my experience these other languages are C and C++.  Java requires
> explicit x == null for objets for example.  Ruby is similar to Lua in
> this respect as well.  Basically what I'm getting at is that the
> majority of languages are not this way.  I used to think the same
> thing as you, but in the end my thinking was warped by the all
> pervasiveness of C and C++.

The Lua behavior of treating "" and 0 as true make the `a and b or c`
approximation of the ternary operator [1] more likely to work.  On the
other hand, I find quite a few occasions where it doesn't work and I
would prefer a real ternary operator.

[1] http://lua-users.org/wiki/TernaryOperator