I've also seen (non-GPU) programs use numbers with multiplication, instead of if-else, as a means of preventing CPU branch stalls. This technique is sometimes called branchless programming.

Oh, that makes more sense, because ?: has eyes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_operator

?:-)

I'm a big fan of the Elvis operator myself (.?)

Floats are an excellent choice because they encode the inevitable ambiguity of the world. Instead of true and false we can have

    true    = 1
    false   = 0
    perhaps = 0.5

Now that we have defined a language without booleans, we need some way to coalesce these optional values

We ideally want an infix function that can reduce the "truthiness" of two values.

Let us imagine this language is a Haskell-type-thing, and we can define pseudo-operators with pattern matching

    infixr 3 &&
    (&&) :: Optional -> Optional -> Optional
    Empty && _       = Empty
    _ && Empty       = Empty
    Some A && Some B = Some A
    _ && _           = Empty

    infixr 2 ||
    Some || _     = Some
    None || Some  = Some
    None || None  = None
    _    || _     = None 

    a = b && c
    d = e || f