Why does Ruby have TrueClass and FalseClass instead of a single Boolean class?

Question

I was working on serializing values when found out about this one. Ruby has a TrueClass class, and a FalseClass class, but it has no Boolean class. I\'d like to

Answer 1

Since everything but false and nil evaluate to true in Ruby by default, you would only need to add parsing to String.

Something like this could work:

class Object

  ## Makes sure any other object that evaluates to false will work as intended,
  ##     and returns just an actual boolean (like it would in any context that expect a boolean value).
  def trueish?; !!self; end

end

class String

  ## Parses certain strings as true; everything else as false.
  def trueish?
    # check if it's a literal "true" string
    return true if self.strip.downcase == 'true'

    # check if the string contains a numerical zero
    [:Integer, :Float, :Rational, :Complex].each do |t|
      begin
        converted_number = Kernel.send(t, self)
        return false if converted_number == 0
      rescue ArgumentError
        # raises if the string could not be converted, in which case we'll continue on
      end
    end

    return false
  end

end

When used, this would give you:

puts false.trueish?   # => false
puts true.trueish?    # => true
puts 'false'.trueish? # => false
puts 'true'.trueish?  # => true
puts '0'.trueish?     # => false
puts '1'.trueish?     # => true
puts '0.0'.trueish?   # => false
puts '1.0'.trueish?   # => true

I believe part of the “big idea” behind Ruby is to just make the behavior you desire inherent to your program (e.g. boolean parsing), rather creating a fully encapsulated class that lives in it's own namespace world (e.g. BooleanParser).