Right, sometimes you want that. I suppose my point was that the definition of truthiness works well with the default, most obvious way of indexing a dictionary, which was the original complaint.

Perhaps I was a bit harsh -- that exposes an issue which does trip people up, where they use `if x:` when you mean `if x is not None:`.

Saying that, I think it's defensible in the same way. The fact that you can write `if x:` (where x is not a bool) tells you that the language has a concept of truthiness, and so maybe you should have a think about what that actually means.