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Why do libraries define their own true and false?
(pawb.social)
I’m working through the vulkan tutorial and came across GLFW_TRUE and GLFW_FALSE. I presume there’s a good reason but in looking at the docs it’s just defining 1 and 0, so I’m sorta at a loss as to why some libraries do this (especially in cpp?).
Tangentially related is having things like vk_result which is a struct that stores an enum full of integer codes.
Wouldn’t it be easier to replace these variables with raw int codes or in the case of GLFW just 1 and 0?
Coming mostly from C, and having my caps lock bound to escape for vim, the amount of all caps variables is arduous for my admittedly short fingers.
Anyway hopefully one of you knows why libraries do this thanks!
I found the comments/answers about backwards compatibility of not defined booleans and negative true interesting and plausible.
What I first thought of was that TRUE and FALSE can be redefined, so it serves as ensurance that within the library consistent values are being used no matter what other libs and callers do with their typing and definitions.