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Type-constrained Boolean variables fail to implicitly convert from most types, such as PSObject / PSCustomObject instances

See original GitHub issue

Steps to reproduce

# OK: convert via cast (assigns $true)
$b = [bool] [pscustomobject]::new()

# !! BROKEN: convert via type constraint
[bool] $b = [pscustomobject]::new()

Expected behavior

No output. Both assignments should succeed.

Actual behavior

The 2nd statement causes the following error:

Cannot convert value "System.Management.Automation.PSCustomObject" to type "System.Boolean". 
Boolean parameters accept only Boolean values and numbers, such as $True, $False, 1 or 0

Environment data

PowerShell Core 7.0.0-preview.3

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 4 years ago
Reactions:2
Comments:10 (4 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

vexx32commented, Sep 28, 2020

Seems to me the logic would be better placed in the binder logic itself, rather than in variable assignment. Might be a bit of work to do, but IMO typical variable assignments should not be half mixed up in what should be binder-specific logic. The binder does a fair bit of extra logic as it is already, it’s kind of weird that this (and seemingly this alone) got thrown into the standard variable assignment logic.

1reaction

vexx32commented, Sep 17, 2020

Given that this also doesn’t happen with any other type, I think it makes sense to remove this special case. See #13651 for a related issue that arises because of this special casing.

/cc @SteveL-MSFT @rjmholt can we get y’all’s thoughts on this one?