Personally, I try not to think too much about this. I am happy with whatever option the core team picks, provided that we don’t keep discussing it. I can appreciate arguments for all sides of this debate, but for me this does not make it into the top 500 issues, and the discussion/importance ratio for this particular issue appears to approach ∞.
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To directly address the original question,
Why allow exponentiation with a Boolean?
If you look at what’s actually being called, you’ll find that there isn’t an explicit method for Bool:
julia> @which "hello"^true
^(s::AbstractString, r::Integer) in Base at strings/types.jl:154
The fact that "hello"^true works is actually just a side effect of the fact that Bool <: Integer.
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