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I was working on serializing values when found out about this one. Ruby has a TrueClass class, and a FalseClass class, but it has no Boolean class. I’d like to know why is this.
I see some advantages in using a Boolean; for example, string parsing could be centralized on it.
Ruby developers are smarter than me, so there must be a lot of good reasons that I just don’t see. But right now it looks to me like having OneClass and a TwoClass instead of Fixnum.
It seems that Matz himself answered this question on a mailing list message in 2004.
Short version of his answer: “right now it works ok, adding a Boolean doesn’t give any advantage”.
Personally I don’t agree with that; the aforementioned “string parsing” is one example. Another one is that when you are applying different treatment to a variable depending on its type, (i.e. a yml parser) having a “Boolean” class is handy – it removes one “if”. It also looks more correct, but that’s a personal opinion.