Removing true and false

[hanche@ams.sunysb.edu (Harald Hanche-Olsen)]

I was skimming some old, old mail from the es list and came across
this discussion on removing true and false among other primitives.  It
was said that ``{result 0} and {result 1} are short enough to use
explicitly''.

But playing around just now, I discovered what must surely be the
shortest possible ways to write true and false:

  {} and {!} respectively.

Can you beat that?

Actually, I think it's more intuitive:  The empty command sequence
must surely succeed, and its negation must therefore fail.  There is
no need to think about 0 being true and 1 being false.

If $&true and $&false aren't gone yet, now is the time to toss them
out!  (It might be useful to mention {} and {!} in the manual).

- Harald