I have this notion of perl developers sitting around deciding upon what is "true" and what is "false"
It was probably Larry Wall sitting all by himself who decided that. And even more probable that it were just the underlying C-libraries which already used these rules.

That being said, the real problem is that Perl5 and before do not have the concept of a "boolean" type and therefore a rule --somewhat arbitrarily-- had to be made to decide what was true and what was false.

It is all just convention: why do people in most parts of the world nod to mean "yes", but in Greece it means "no"(*)? And why does the word "nod" contain the word "no" although it means (most of the time) "yes"? that is languages, just go with the flow or you will confuse everybody to no end.

(*) Yes, I know it is a different kind of "nod", but it still confuses the hell out of us poor tourists.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

In reply to Re^3: NaNs are true by CountZero
in thread NaNs are true by syphilis

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