boolean values not converted to the correct scalar type about ion-python HOT 2 CLOSED

My recollection of this (and it has been a long time), has to do with sub-typing True and False, which Python doesn't let you do (see this thread). IIRC, we have this problem with None as well.

That said, a potential solution here is, in the non-annotated case (where the Boolean value has no additional Ion value type meta-data like annotations), we could potentially use the non-Ion type there. I'd have to dig into this a bit deeper, to make sure this doesn't break anything, but I think it could work at the cost of a slight bit more complexity.

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A different user recently asked about this behavior and it prompted me to dig a bit. Here's what I found.

I don't believe that the type of the values in memory are incorrect. I do believe that the behavior is confusing for users, because the __repr__ is confusing and the type() is misleading.

Consider:

>>> b = simpleion.loads('true')
>>> b
1
>>> type(b)
<class 'amazon.ion.simple_types.IonPyInt'>
>>> b.ion_type
<IonType.BOOL: 1>
>>> simpleion.dumps(b, binary=False)
'$ion_1_0 true'

So we can see that simpleion does correctly roundtrip the value and that the ion_type is correct.

Another confusion is with default equality, though ion_equals() is correct:

>>> from amazon.ion import simpleion
>>> from amazon.ion.equivalence import ion_equals
>>> i = simpleion.loads('1')
>>> b = simpleion.loads('true')
>>> i == b
True <--- seems wrong, but actually 1 == True in python
>>> ion_equals(i, b)
False

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