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Comment by icambron | Hacker News Reader

I was curious about that. Is multiplying a string by a boolean idiomatic Python? I don't write nearly enough Python to know, but it strikes me that this might be more like writing French using lots of obscure words.

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This starts to get into "what is idiomatic python?" which changes as the language evolves. For example, before Python had an official ternary form, this was a common idiom:

    account.status = ["paid", "unpaid"][amount_due > 0]

This does the same thing as the FizzBuzz example, coercing a bool to int. Here the int is used as an index into the list of the two strings.

Personally, I found this handy and liked it a lot. Others didn't and now there is this, which isn't bad:

   account.status = "unpaid" if amount_due > 0 else "paid"

Maybe it's less like using obscure French and more like speaking in a slightly different dialect, or in a different region with different cultural references.

Multiplying a string by an integer is fine.

Treating a boolean as an integer is iffy

Multiplying a string by a boolean frankly should be a no-no.

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