alt Hacker NewsBy "to do this" do you mean to not use booleans? It's because the value does not represent a binary true or false but rather a means by which the item is deleted or dead. So not only would it not make sense semantically, it would break if a third means were introduced.
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0cf8612b2e1e • yesterday at 11:01 PM
Funny, because the HackerNews API [0] does return booleans for those fields. That is, a state, not a type of deletion or death.
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> It's because the value does not represent a binary true or false but rather a means by which the item is deleted or dead.
"Deleted" and "dead" are separate columns.
> So not only would it not make sense semantically, it would break if a third means were introduced.
If that was the intention, it would seem like a bad design decision to me. And actually what you assume to be the reasoning, is exactly what should be avoided. Which makes it a bad thing.
This is a limitation not because of having the bool value be represented by an int (or rather "be presented as"), but because of the t y p e , being an integer.