What's the point of the Boolean object?

Question

I am reading through the Mozilla Manual on JavaScript, and I come to this point in my reading, Boolean object. I can\'t see a single use for them. What\'s their point? Why w

Answer 1

I would have to side with most of the people here that there isn't much need for the Boolean object, but I do want to point out a couple of things.

An explicit comparison will still evaluate like a boolean:

var someBool = new Boolean(false);
if (someBool == false)
    alert('Got here'); //Alerts 'Got here'

Because of this, you could sort of extend it to a subclass and still be able to have the comparison work as above:

var classExtension = {
    toYN: function() {
        return this == false ? 'N' : 'Y';
    }
};

function getNewClass(val) {
    var newBool = new Boolean(val);
    jQuery.extend(newBool, classExtension);
    return newBool;
}

var newTest = getNewClass(false);
if (newTest)
    alert('It\'s alive');
if (newTest == false)
    alert('And still a bool');
alert(newTest.toYN());

This will alert 'It's alive', 'And still a bool' and 'N'. http://jsfiddle.net/fkJuk/

But again, would you ever really need this? Even if you did, it would probably be better just to have your own separate class with a boolean property that gets checked. In the end, it's probably here for consistency; every primitive has direct constructor and prototype access in JavaScript.