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

In Common Lisp, 0 is also treated as true. For example, the following code returns true.

(if 0 'true 'false)

No doubt, Ruby is following the same design decision made in Lisp. In Lisp, only an empty list (represented by nil) is false.