[erlang-questions] Booleans in bit syntax

[Mark Jones]

I'd just like to point out that the logic is sometimes inverted.
Specifically when you're interfacing to certain types of hardware.

Cheers,
Mark

Sent from my PDP-11

On Jan 20, 2018 8:14 PM, "Viktor Söderqvist" <viktor@REDACTED> wrote:

> The topic 1=true and 0=false as a convention seems to be controversial. :-)
>
> If not adding booleans in bit syntax, then how about adding build-in
> conversion functions for booleans and bit values? E.g.
> boolean_to_integer/1.
>
> If we can't assume that convention, then how about adding four
> functions: is_zero/1, is_one/1, true_count/1 and false_count/1 instead?
> That should get rid of any confusion.
>
> Theoretically, of course there are two possible bijective mappings
> between bit values (0, 1) and boolean values (true, false).
>
> It may be radical, but in practice, I believe the convention (1 for
> true) can be safely assumed to be generally understood by almost
> everyone in almost every such such mapping situation. Even persons who
> doesn't have any insight in programming often have an intuition that it
> is all about ones and zeroes, representing true/false, or electric
> switch on/off; the bit as the smallest and most basic unit of
> information in computers.
>
> Replies to Jacob and Kostis inline.
>
> On 2018-01-20 15:53, Jacob wrote:
> > In my opinion, it changes much without really filling a gap. So far, the
> > <<>> expressions/matches only convert numbers to binaries/bitstrings and
> > vice versa.
>
> Bit syntax can also convert between Unicode codepoints, UTF-8, UTF-16
> and UTF-32. It can convert endianess for IEEE floats and integers too.
> Pretty much any convenient conversion for basic types to/from binary.
>
>     << <<X/utf16-little>> || <<X/utf8>> <= <<"Example">> >>.
>
> On 2018-01-20 15:58, Kostis Sagonas wrote:
> > Yes. The Erlang type language already has a type boolean() which is
> > defined to comprise of the atoms 'true' and 'false'.
>
> true and false are not just any atoms. They have special meaning in
> language constructs for branching, i.e. logic. Arguably the most basic
> values of all.
>
> On 2018-01-20 15:53, Jacob wrote:
> > What about
> >
> >   decode_stuff(<<F1:1, F2:1, 0:6, Rest/binary>>) ->
> >       {F1 =:= 1, F2 =:= 1, Rest}
> >
> > it's even shorter than your proposal and already works (okay, encoding
> > bools is a different thing).
>
> You are right, the manual conversion is really just three tokens.
>
> The simplest encoding I can think of would be a function call, given you
> already have such a function in your module.
>
> > I prefer to have explicit conversions, IMO they are much better to
> > maintain than using conversion magic.
>
> Doesn't the type specifier in the bit syntax indicate an explicit
> conversion between binary and the explicitly specified type?
>
> On 2018-01-20 15:58, Kostis Sagonas wrote:
> > Suddenly adding some syntactic sugar which transforms 1s to trues and 0s
> > to falses in binaries does not add any significant expressive power to
> > the language; just confusion.
>
> Isn't most of the binary syntax just syntactic sugar for conversions?
>
> Viktor
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