Why Treat 0 as True in Ruby?

Question

I\'m reading through the excellent Ruby on Rails Tutorial and have encountered the following code.

if 0
  true
else
  false
end

The above r

Answer 1

I'm guessing that Matz wanted conceptual simplicity of "truthiness" as such - the only "false" values are false and nil. Period.

Using just false would be the cleanest but there is understandable need for including nil. To include the integer zero as a special case might open the mental floodgates of questioning truthiness of other types. What about strings, is "" false? And arrays, is [] false? And hashes, is {} false? Ad insanitum (see JavaScript)...