Synthetic Sugar: Boolean literals

Overview

Boolean literals to i32 and Boolean() (requires Number() for interop)

Impact

Medium: easier to understand boolean values while maintaining them at compile level

Details

false => i32 0
true => i32 1

false + any		TypeError
Number(false)		i32 0
Number(true)		i32 1
Number(false) + 5	5
false && true		false
Boolean(0)		false

Due Date

default

Kinda tangential, but in some languages (basically, almost all non-C languages around the time C first arrived) use true === all bits set (in other words, -1 for i32).

The benefit of that is that bitwise and logical operators are the same, or nearly the same in the case of bitwise AND:

!true === ~true and ~false === !false
(true | value) === true
(true & value) === value

Sadly, this breaks with JavaScript convention, which uses C-style 1, that is: (true | 0) === 1, so true = -1 is more like something the Engineer would have to decide to use when handling true and false.

Yeah, this is pretty necessary to have at this point. Thanks!

I've been almost able to copy paste around JS code into Walt, but I keep running into fixing all the bools. Since I'm feeling the pain I can only imagine someone coming into the project fresh having to deal with this haha.

It'll probably introduce it with tiered releases. As true and false are trivial to introduce but the type errors are a bit more work as they require new types. And only compile-time types too.

Boolean() and Number() would probably be static type-casts though. As Number is not a type and Boolean will likely make more sense as a <number> : bool as things stand currently. They would also be purely developer convenience additional type safety as the WebAssembly could care less what we type-hint the values, as an i32 is an i32 no matter what at the end of the day. I could maybe see keeping Boolean() but Number() is just not specific enough :/

Partly implemented in #107 I found that porting javascript code was difficult without them :)

See an example here

walt/packages/walt-compiler/src/__tests__/string-spec.walt

Line 87 in 17df62a

while(iterator.done == false) {

It's only partly implemented as there isn't a boolean type and there aren't any static type checks. Also, booleans are either 1or 0.

Implemented by #133