Nil vs empty data types

6 events

when toggle format	what		by	license	comment
Aug 9, 2019 at 20:16	comment	added	JimmyJames		I guess if you want to be sure the reference is to `None` you need to use `is` but I still think it should be the exception that you are checking for identity, not the rule.
Aug 9, 2019 at 19:38	comment	added	JimmyJames		If it's crucial to the algorithm that the reference is `None` then you should be checking for `None`. I think `something != None` is more clear way of doing that. But I disagree that building logic around truthiness is necessarily wrong. Overriding `__bool__` is a useful feature.
Aug 9, 2019 at 19:29	comment	added	amon		@JimmyJames None is supposed to be a singleton, and checking for identity is the only reasonable approach. As explained in my answer, truthiness can be misleading. Personally, I'm tired of bugs where you cannot set a parameter to zero or the empty string.
Aug 9, 2019 at 19:24	comment	added	JimmyJames		I'm not sure I buy that checking explicitly for `None` is necessarily better. Building logic around object identity seems like an error to me. If you instead build around truthiness, you can use None or something more sophisticated. If you hard-code `None` in your checks, it's a lot less flexible.
Aug 9, 2019 at 19:10	vote	accept	Michael M
Aug 9, 2019 at 18:08	history	answered	amon	CC BY-SA 4.0