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Concept
Boolean data type
Summary
In computer science, the Boolean (sometimes shortened to Bool) is a data type that has one of two possible values (usually denoted true and false) which is intended to represent the two truth values of logic and Boolean algebra. It is named after George Boole, who first defined an algebraic system of logic in the mid 19th century. The Boolean data type is primarily associated with conditional statements, which allow different actions by changing control flow depending on whether a programmer-specified Boolean condition evaluates to true or false. It is a special case of a more general logical data type—logic does not always need to be Boolean (see probabilistic logic).
In programming languages with a built-in Boolean data type, such as Pascal and Java, the comparison operators such as > and ≠ are usually defined to return a Boolean value. Conditional and iterative commands may be defined to test Boolean-valued expressions.
Languages with no explicit Boolean data type, like C90 and Lisp, may still represent truth values by some other data type. Common Lisp uses an empty list for false, and any other value for true. The C programming language uses an integer type, where relational expressions like i > j and logical expressions connected by && and || are defined to have value 1 if true and 0 if false, whereas the test parts of if, while, for, etc., treat any non-zero value as true. Indeed, a Boolean variable may be regarded (and implemented) as a numerical variable with one binary digit (bit), or as a bit string of length one, which can store only two values. The implementation of Booleans in computers are most likely represented as a full word, rather than a bit; this is usually due to the ways computers transfer blocks of information.
Most programming languages, even those with no explicit Boolean type, have support for Boolean algebraic operations such as conjunction (AND, &, *), disjunction (OR, |, +), equivalence (EQV, =, ==), exclusive or/non-equivalence (XOR, NEQV, ^, !=, ¬), and negation (NOT, ~, !, ¬).
Official source
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