Jonathan Blow

Preaching the "bool cannot be an unsigned integer" gospel to our intern.

wait what

It is a common design error of C-family languages to treat bool as an unsigned 1-bit integer. There are two acceptable options: - bool is not an integer at all - bool is a 1-bit signed integer (and hence has values 0 and -1).

is this because you can then take advantage of all register bits being set to 1 (e.g. in simd code)?

Not only for simd, it's much, much more consistent behavior throughout. E.g. if `true` is signed, then `~true` is `false` in promoted integer arithmetic. With unsigned `~true` and `false` are different values.

cc @AbnerCoimbre because i don't know how Jai treats this

hm... so if bool was specified at the language level to be a signed int (and two's complement), then for any boolean b: ~b == !b ... which means you can get rid of either ~ or ! (and potentially use that one-token character for something else)

*er, "one-character token"