Branch: 17557-added isAbstract to Boolean, Fixes #17557

[sanyakapoor27]

Fixes #17557

• Class Boolean returns True now on Boolean isAbstract.
• Opened a new PR to fix branch related issues and ensure cleaner commits.

[ErikOnBike]

Hi @sanyakapoor27
Nice to see your PR!
The issue (as well as fix) might seem pretty simple at first. You've chosen an implementation which is not uncommon in Pharo (although you could also have chosen self == Boolean to prevent having to access the class' name and a slightly more common approach, although I didn't actually count the occurrences).

An interesting approach could also be, to NOT perform any checks/comparisons. We know there are exactly 2 subclasses of Boolean. Boolean's have a very interesting way to help us have something other languages call 'conditionals'. The ifTrue: and ifFalse: methods are implemented in such a way that we do not need to check for the condition itself. Could you come up with a solution without performing any actual comparison?
Just answer/put a response here, don't update the code just yet! :-)

[sanyakapoor27]

Hi there @ErikOnBike !
Thank you for your feedback! To avoid using any comparisons or checks, could we create Boolean isAbstract and have it return true while overriding it in True & False classes to return false? Please let me know if this aligns with what you're thinking of, otherwise I'll think of another solution! thanks :)

[ErikOnBike]

That was indeed my thought. In line with the instance side implementation of Boolean methods.

The interesting result is that the methods are easy to understand, very small and fast to execute. The fact that 3 methods are needed instead of 1 can be considered less efficient from source code perspective though. I think that is not a big problem and ease of understanding weighs heavier.
To be honest, your code is also not very difficult to understand :-D.

But please let someone else make the decision. I'm not sure my idea is appreciated by others. Let's wait for some more feedback.