Comment by da_chicken

Again, you are explaining the specifications to defend why the specifications are what they are. That's circular reasoning. Describing the behavior doesn't defend it, and invoking convention doesn't work because different languages have different conventions (which is how we got here).

You know what you do when you can't handle an exceptional case? You throw an exception! Emitting errors is not undesirable behavior! It just means the computer says, "I don't know what to do so I better stop." You're never going to design all possible exceptions away, and that's not a flaw.

The question you should be asking is: why does it ever make sense to silently compare a character string to anything other than a character string? Semanticly, it's nonsense to compare different types. The only way you can do it is when the other type has a canonical string representation, neverminding issues of culture or language.

This is why, for example, C# has String.IsNullOrWhitespace() and String.IsNullOrEmpty(). It's partly to cover common combinations, but also to idiomatically determine if a meaningful value is present, which is what `StringVal == True` and `if (StringVal)` are trying to express and failing at.