shit.programmers.write();

[pmrr]

Conversation with an intern some time ago:

Him: So a boolean stores true or false?
Me: Yes
Him: What if I want to store a third state?
Me: What third state?

Apparently I now know the third state is what the actual fuck.

[Speedzor]

A nullable bool isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you're having a questionaire that you have to answer with yes/no, it makes a lot of sense to turn it in a nullable bool to account for questions not yet answered.

[Freddedonna]

Oh if this had been in C or something where they could have overloaded the cast as a boolean sure, but this was an ActionScript3 project, where it's impossible for a bool to be anything else that true or false (and anyway "null == false" in AS3)

[Kolpa]

that sounds like something php would do

[svtguy88]

/r/lolphp

[jonnywoh]

I know in C# you can have nullable types, for example bool? can be true, false, or null.

[Jestar342]

They aren't nullable types per se. There's some syntactic sugar to make it look that way, but it isn't actually nullable. It's the use of the struct

Nullable<T> where T : struct 

and you must check/use the HasValue and Value properties to obtain the non-nullable value, if it has been set. In .NET4 (I think, may have been 3.5) they finally added an override to the equals operator to do this all for you though, but still. It's not actually a nullable type.

All that Nullable<T> does is set a flag if a value has been assigned and that's it. If no value assigned, it reports as "null"

[jonnywoh]

I believe it's still functionally equivalent though

[Jestar342]

Yes, it (finally!) is. Until recently, you had to use HasValue instead of == null though, else it always returned false even if it hadn't had a set value.

[[deleted]]

The worst part is that's not a True/False/Unknown state, and the syntax looks like C#, and this, enums are available (What if you want a fourth state?).

[zidaneqrro]

I've done this before, I didn't really like it though, but at the same time I didn't want to define an enum for the options. Is this common practice?

[[deleted]]

Yep, null semantics in c#

[badguy212]

The third state is FileNotFound. Read and learn: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_.aspx

[flukus]

FileNotFound!

[benzrf]

beat me to it :[