Re: [boost] 3-state boolean type

From: Richard Hadsell (hadsell_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-08-01 18:49:21

Beman Dawes wrote:
> 
> I almost suggested the same thing a few months ago, under the name
> fuzzy_bool, because I needed it in an application.
> 
> But it turned out the only thing fuzzy was my application design, and I
> lost interest in fuzzy_bool once the application design moved on.
> 
> In fact that has been my experience with three-state logic every time I've
> run into it.  Either the application turns out to be trivial to do with
> regular two-state logic, or seriously vague logic is needed and the app
> moves to a weighed logic scheme.  But maybe if it were a component sitting
> in a library, more uses would be found.

We have a rather complex application that quite often needs 3-state logic --
true, false, or undecided.  Since making decisions sometimes require a huge
amount of work, we don't want to do it until we need to know, and then we don't
want to do it again.

That's not the same as fuzzy logic, and it would be a very good use of the
proposed 3-state data type, in my opinion.  The third state in this usage would
be better named 'undecided' or 'undetermined', rather than 'indeterminate'.  For
brevity, however, I suggest 'maybe' as the third state.  It's just as likely to
be applicable as the other possibilities, and its meaning is clear as an
alternative to 'true' or 'false'.

-- 
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