Call it what you want; I'm not arguing it to be pedantic, I think it's a very practical approach. But if you prefer:

All other things being equal, I see no reason to write code that needlessly introduces potential bugs and maintainability issues by ignoring the rule of thumb that explicit trumps implicit.

It's an old argument. I don't have real strong feelings about it. I think there is enough code doing one or the other out there that the end result is to understand well the ramifications of both, so it ends up a matter of taste.

The documentation is pretty clear about it:

http://docs.python.org/release/3.3.4/library/stdtypes.html#t...

Which leads to this:

    >>> a=object()
    >>> bool(a)
    True
    >>>