Trivalent Logic

My two favourite posts on DailyWFT is the Brilliant Paula Bean and What is Truth. Whereas the Paula Bean post is just, well, brilliant the What is Truth post I’ve started to feel is a tad harsh.

The post describes the most bizarre enum – a custom Boolean with three values – True, False and FileNotFound. Hahahahaha – how dumb. However the Infragistics Excel component I’ve been using recently also has a three part Boolean

ExcelDefaultableBoolean.True
ExcelDefaultableBoolean.False
ExcelDefaultableBoolean.Default

Mmmm – less dumb. And it doesn’t take much to dream up circumstances that you may need more parts to your Boolean

True
False
Default
Unknown
Not Specified

We seem to expect that because computers work with 1s and 0s we should too and any attempt to extend Boolean logic is just wrong. However, while jamming file not found into a bool may well be a little odd, I’ll certainly be liberating my Booleans this week from the tryanny of binary logic. 10 part Booleans anyone. You know you want to.