I will never forget my gut wrenching feeling when I opened up one of the main provisioning scripts (in Python) to read the first two lines:

  True = 0
  False = -1

  True = 0
  False = -1

Could you please explain what is so egregious about those two lines for those people that may not see it? Asking for a friend.

This script is changing it to be backwards, and python is flexible enough to allow that. But I would expect this would break most python libraries, because it's such a core language feature that's being completely restructured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_data_type

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.0.html#changed-syntax

(Python has a search path: it looks first on the current module, then on the built-in __builtins__ module, which is where the built-in constants and functions reside.)

Is there a valid use case for changing the numeric values of True and False?

Python 2 has _many_ quirks like this one. Python 3 was not just "it's unicode".

No! Actually I take it back this _is_ definitely still a terrible idea and will lead to certain madness for all involved. :)

However maybe the professor needed 'true/false' to represent something to be used in his formulas so this made sense to him. But who knows.

    >>> True = 0
    >>> False = -1
    >>> if False: print('oh no')

https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%28%3Fm%29%5E%5Cs%2AT...