Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

A Boolean Type

In Python, there is a type called bool (without an “e”). Unlike int and float, which have billions of possible values, bool has only two: True and False. True and False are values, just as much as the numbers 0 and -43.7.

George Boole

In the 1840s, the mathematician George Boole showed that the classical rules of logic could be expressed in purely mathematical form using only the two values true and false. A century later, Claude Shannon (the inventor of information theory) realized that Boole’s work could be used to optimize the design of electromechanical telephone switches. His work led directly to the use of Boolean logic to design computer circuits.

In honor of Boole’s work, most modern programming languages use a type ...