For non-nerd readers, I promise I won't do this very often, but once in a while I just have to get these sorts of things out of my system. Does anyone else find the following (from a transcript of a short Unix shell session) a little weird?

peter@localhost:~$ true
peter@localhost:~$ echo $?
0
peter@localhost:~$ false
peter@localhost:~$ echo $?
1

The test of whether you're a nerd reader or not, of course, is first, whether the above makes sense to you, and second, if it does, do you immediately see why I find it weird?

(And for the really nerdy nerds who are brimming full of explanations of why it's not really weird at all, it makes perfect sense for things to be that way, yes, I know why it's that way. I write Unix shell programs too. I just said it was a little weird, not that it was bad engineering. It isn't, all things considered.)