Why 0 is true but false is 1 in the shell?

Question

false; echo $?

The above will output 1, which is contradictory with all other programming languages I know.

Any reason in this

Answer 1

AFAIK this come from the C convention that you should return 0 if succeded. See:

man close

Most of the C (POSIX) api is build like this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_POSIX_library