Reminder: see if I can implement megabool in Delphi (or at least trilean)
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/06
Now that I re-wrote my 2012 talk on Class Operators and Helpers and presented it in Delphi at the ITDevCon2024 ([Wayback/Archive] ITDevCon | Home – Rome, 2024), see [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – jpluimers/ITDevCon2024: Temporary ITDevCon2024 repository until I fixed the «git checkout “Illegal byte sequence”» of my Conferences repository, here is an idea to check out if I can implement it in Delphi:
[WaybackSave/Archive] goosewin on X: “you should add megabool to your projects …”
This was a wildly popular screenshot in November 2024 on social media (not just Twitter or [Wayback/Archive] John Vandivier | Edge cases be like join our community: https://ladderly.io | Instagram, but also for instance [Wayback/Archive] Post by @doomsmoker.bsky.social — Bluesky) but, according to what I could find, originated from this February 2024 thread on [Wayback/Archive] Hash Tables | MetaFilter:
…
There are booleans and then there are probabilistic booleans.
As a computer nerd, I know what you are a talking about, but I just have to make this joke:
enum megabool {
TRUE,
FALSE,
NEITHER,
BOTH,
MAYBE,
TRUEISH,
FALSEISH,
IT_DEPENDS,
OSCILLATING,
ITS_COMPLICATED,
DOUBLE_TRUE,
DOUBLE_FALSE,
...posted by [Wayback/Archive] DreamerFi’s profile | MetaFilter at 3:31 AM on February 12, 2024 [9 favorites]
Or maybe I should start with Three-valued logic (some call this troolean, others trinary, trivalent, ternary, or trilean storing the internal values in either of these two forms:
- 0, 1, 2: Ternary numeral system
- -1, 0, 1: Balanced ternary – Wikipedia
Then I might extend it to values consisting of multiple trits, and doing conversions to/from string and integer plus of course various operations to cover as many operators as possible.
Query: [WaybackSave/Archive] enum “megabool” – Google Search
Inspiration for a few operators: [WaybackSave/Archive] GitHub – RobTillaart/Troolean: Arduino Library for a three state logic datatype supporting {True False Unknown}
- [Wayback/Archive] Troolean/Troolean.h at master · RobTillaart/Troolean · GitHub
- [Wayback/Archive] Troolean/Troolean.cpp at master · RobTillaart/Troolean · GitHub
Edit 20250910: there is a new cool video about [Wayback/Archive] The System That Could Replace Binary And Change Computers FOREVER – YouTube
Ternary computing uses -1, 0, and 1 instead of just 0 and 1, and for a brief moment in the 1950s, it looked like it could redefine how we build computers. A Soviet team even built a working ternary machine called Setun. So why did the world choose binary? And could ternary still make a comeback?
--jeroen
PS: Per comment below, Russian Bit is a cool name too (:
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
HeartWare said
In my code, it’s called a “RussianBit” (can’t remember where that originates, but that’s the term I learned when I was a kid).
jpluimers said
That’s a cool name!