I’m working through the vulkan tutorial and came across GLFW_TRUE and GLFW_FALSE. I presume there’s a good reason but in looking at the docs it’s just defining 1 and 0, so I’m sorta at a loss as to why some libraries do this (especially in cpp?).
Tangentially related is having things like vk_result which is a struct that stores an enum full of integer codes.
Wouldn’t it be easier to replace these variables with raw int codes or in the case of GLFW just 1 and 0?
Coming mostly from C, and having my caps lock bound to escape for vim, the amount of all caps variables is arduous for my admittedly short fingers.
Anyway hopefully one of you knows why libraries do this thanks!
This is often done for backward compatibility, as stdbool.h which provides true and false wasn’t standard before C99 and even though that’s more than 25 years ago now a lot of old habits die hard.
stdbool.h (along with float.h, limits.h, stdarg.h, stddef.h, stdint.h, and some other library facilities) is required to be provided even in freestanding environment so, at least as long as you use an ISO C conformant compiler, you can always include those even if you don’t have a libc implementation
Yeah in the late 90’s I was coding in C++ and I’m pretty sure I had to define true and false manually.
My boss insisted, before I arrived at the company, that everything in the database be coded so that 1 = Yes and 2 = No, because that’s the way he likes to think of it. It causes us daily pain.
I imagine this would still lead to a never ending stream of subtle logic errors.
from bossland import billysbool, billysand
from geography import latlong
import telephony
def send_missile_alert(missiles_incoming: billysbool, is_drill: billysbool, target: latlong):
if billysand(missiles_incoming, not is_drill):
for phone in telephony.get_all_residents(target):
phone.send_alert("Missiles are inbound to your location")
Can you spot the bug?
The conventional ‘not’ would not behave differently for the two non-zero values. Insidious.
I’m reminded of an old job’s database where every key was named “id_foo” instead of “foo_id”
You didn’t have user_id. You had id_user. You didn’t have project_id, you had id_project. Most of the time, anyway. It was weird and no one could remember why it was like that. (Also changes to the DB were kind of just yolo, there wasn’t like a list of migrations or anything)
Does your boss frequently browse the database table records outside the API?
why not just take it a step further and make true = “Yes” and false = “No”
I have seen this, but with “Y”, “N” instead. That was the way the database stored it and the way the UI displayed it, but everything inbetween converted to boolean instead, because there was logic depending on those choices. It wasn’t that bad, all things considered, just a weird quirk in the system. I think there was another system that did just use those strings plain (like WHERE foo = 'Y' in stored procedures), but nothing I had to work with. We just mapped “Y” to true when reading the query results and were done with it.
(And before anyone asks, yes, we considered any other value false. If anyone complained that their “Yes”, “y” or empty was seen as false, we told them they used it wrong. They always accepted that, though they didn’t necessarily learn from it.)
Microsoft SQL Server has a bit type and you always use 0 and 1 and cast/convert them. No native bool type. It’s a hassle.
Well that would be ok, because any standard tool for interfacing with the database would transparently treat bit in the DB as bool in the code. I think many DBs call it a bit rather than a bool.
My brain is so used to seeing political content that I read “why do liberals define their own true and false” and was already like “what kind of shit take am I going to have fun reading today”
I can give you a shit take if you want one, but I don’t have shiitake mushrooms.
I work with young people starting out in IT, so I’m used to getting screenshots, and I’m so used to screenshots made with a phone instead of just capturing the screen, that I’ve stopped complaining… But come on! At least evaluate the result of the first picture and maybe do another if it’s illegible.
GLFW is a C library, not a C++ one, and an old one at that, and so the reason is that a long time ago, there was no bool in C. Every library would make their own true and false bc it’s handy to have.
Nowadays, the type _Bool has been added to C, and C++ has built-in bool, but you can still see the legacy of no boolean in C as to use the type name “bool” as well as the key words “true” and “false” for 1 and 0, you have to include “stdbool.h,” as well as in custom types in these old GL-adjacent libraries.
