Stringly Typed Booleans

Posted on by

I’m getting rather hacked off seeing boolean properties typed as strings. Stringly typed is a phrase I learnt off a post from the excellent Coding Horror blog and it describes a phenomena whereby properties that are of a specific type, e.g. Boolean, Date, int, are stored needlessly as strings.

I’m working on a website that communicates with a money laundering service to check whether an individual is “bad” or not. Individuals can pass the test, but importantly it is possible to pass the test with some warning flags raised. If any of the warning flags are raised then an email should be sent off to compliance for them to do…whatever it is they do. Fair enough right?

The warning flags are obviously booleans. There was either a warning raised or there wasn’t – there are no two ways about it (no pun intended). In the serialized response, the warning flags are encoded as “Yes” or “No”…which is understandable. Now, upon receiving the response, it is parsed and turned into an internal representation. This is where things get really weird. The programmer that coded the object that stores the response from the service has decided to encode the warnings as strings, initialised to “”. Which is totally fucking bonkers.

Why?

Well, now our boolean warnings aren’t really booleans – they have WAY more than two possible values and the meaning of these values is subjective. One may consider “”, null, “No” as false, but could conceivably also consider “false” or “0″. We get the same sort of problem with true – “Yes”, “1″, “true” and then we get a whole load of unknown values which is every other possible string in the world. Which might be considered to be true.

So how the hell can any number of programmers work on this piece of code without introducing errors because of differing definitions of truthy and falsey values? Well, they can’t. To illustrate the problem further, even loosely typed languages differ in their boolean coercion, for example JavaScript and PHP:

<script>
if("0") alert('Opposite day!');
</script>

<?php
if("0") echo 'Opposite day!';
?>

JavaScript considers “0″ true but PHP considers it false. Personally I think JavaScript is “right” here, but as I said before, it is totally subjective.

The icing on the cake is of course the extra code you have to write to check the truthy or falsey string values. Something along the lines of “if x is not null and not empty and not the word No then it is probably true…probably”, which would otherwise have been coded as “if x then true” if x was a boolean – which is orders of magnitude shorter.

Of course, there are some bat shit crazy strongly typed languages that allow you to assign null to a Boolean, but that is a different story altogether.

9,858 thoughts on “Stringly Typed Booleans”

  1. Online roulette at 7bet brings the classic casino game straight to you. Place bets on where the ball will land on a spinning wheel, either with our live dealers or through our RNG-powered games. Watch the outcome in real time and experience an authentic casino experience from anywhere. If you like the live gaming experience, check out our Live Casino page for even more action. Stakelogic has over 160 games in its portfolio, and new games are released regularly. Many of the games are well-represented in UK casinos and you can find them easily. Their live casino titles are still a few and harder to find in online casinos, but they are also slowly gaining more popularity. See below some of the most popular games by Stakelogic. Stephan van den Oetelaar, CEO Stakelogic commented: “For Stakelogic it is a logical step forward to move into the live casino market segment. Many of our teer-1 clients repeatedly asked us to complement our service offering with live casino products. Therefore, Stakelogic will hit the ground running, as many of our clients have already committed to go with Stakelogic Live. We are very happy with the new team of Stakelogic Live and the energy this new business venture brings to our company.”
    https://paulmeehan.com/why-you-should-sign-up-to-stake-casino-in-australia-today/
    There are tens of millions of network marketers and hundreds of millions in the history of network marketing. Facilitated by Stakelogic Live’s aggregator partner, Relax Gaming, LeoVegas has added Stakelogic Live’s network tables and gameshow titles to its live dealer portfolio in Sweden and all MGA markets. There are tens of millions of network marketers and hundreds of millions in the history of network marketing. Super Stake Blackjack is StakeLogic’s version of Blackjack with multipliers. The true gem of Vegas Drops Roulette is its exciting Bonus Round, which was first introduced as the cornerstone of the Super Wheel Feature and further popularised in the Super Wheel Game Show. This is now added as an element of excitement to traditional roulette play. RouletteBlackjackBaccarat

  2. free chip no deposit is ho-chunk casino open today (Kathy) bonus united states, online
    pokies free spins on sign up australia and the
    largest casino in australia, or big poker tournaments in australia

  3. Hello! I just want to give an enormous thumbs up for the good info you will have right here on this post. I might be coming again to your weblog for extra soon.

  9. I am regular visitor, how are you everybody? This paragraph posted at this web site is actually good.

  11. I’ve come across that these days, more and more people will be attracted to digital cameras and the field of digital photography. However, being a photographer, you must first commit so much of your time deciding which model of digital camera to buy in addition to moving via store to store just so you could potentially buy the cheapest camera of the trademark you have decided to decide on. But it would not end generally there. You also have to contemplate whether you should purchase a digital digital camera extended warranty. Thanks a lot for the good tips I accumulated from your website.

  15. kontol
    Wonderful article! This is the type of information that
    are supposed to be shared across the net. Shame
    on the seek engines for now not positioning this put up upper!
    Come on over and discuss with my website . Thanks =)

  25. Hi there just wanted to give you a brief heads up and let you know a few of the pictures aren’t loading correctly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different internet browsers and both show the same results.

  33. Hiya, I’m really glad I have found this info. Today bloggers publish only about gossips and web and this is really irritating. A good site with exciting content, that’s what I need. Thanks for keeping this web-site, I will be visiting it. Do you do newsletters? Can not find it.

  36. I’ve been browsing online more than 3 hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. In my opinion, if all web owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the net will be much more useful than ever before.

  37. Пробовал накрутку через дешёвые сервисы — толку не было. Статья помогла понять, почему. Оказывается, я крутил на сырой сайт (не проверил индексацию и позиции в топ-50). Автор даёт чёткий чек-лист перед стартом и объясняет, как проверить, доходят ли клики через Вебмастер. Рекомендую: https://teletype.in/@pfup/3mo6UGVvR2a

  39. Hi there, You have done a fantastic job. I?ll certainly digg it and personally recommend to my friends. I am sure they will be benefited from this site.

  47. Along with the whole thing that seems to be developing throughout this particular area, many of your viewpoints are fairly stimulating. Nonetheless, I am sorry, but I can not give credence to your entire suggestion, all be it radical none the less. It seems to everybody that your comments are actually not totally validated and in reality you are yourself not totally confident of your argument. In any event I did enjoy examining it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>