TRUE and FALSE

[kennykerr]

Should the TRUE and FALSE constants be of type Windows.Win32.SystemServices.BOOL? Currently they're int.

[AArnott]

Should BOOL be an enum with two values? 😱

[weltkante]

Should BOOL be an enum with two values?

There are APIs that return more than two values (most prominently GetMessage), in case thats relevant to the decision

[weltkante]

The quote from the doc actually made me remember that often BOOL is documented as zero vs. nonzero not TRUE vs. FALSE - the constants are for generating BOOL values, not for comparing them. So making this an enum will probably lead to weird edge cases where people try to compare a BOOL with TRUE and its comparing false yet still a nonzero value.

I don't know how clean the implementation of the Windows API is in regard to nonzero BOOL values, aside from officially documented cases like GetMessage. Since all C/C++ code I've ever written or maintained never compared to TRUE literally I never ran into these cases if they exist, code always did the implicit nonzero check.

Making this an enum would be taking a leap of faith since APIs are usually not documented as returning TRUE, but rather nonzero (even if in practice that nonzero probably will be mostly TRUE anyways, but who knows for sure)

For C# projections having a struct which implicitly converts to bool by doing a nonzero check will probably be the more intuitive thing to avoid this kind of bug?

[AArnott]

Agreed. Let's not define an enum. I was mostly kidding on that anyway. But I learned some important things from your comments here, so thank you.