pythonshort-circuitinglanguage-specifications

Is the shortcircuit behaviour of Python's any/all explicit?


Prompted by the discussion here

The docs suggest some equivalent code for the behaviour of all and any

Should the behaviour of the equivalent code be considered part of the definition, or can an implementation implement them in a non-shortcircuit manner?

Here is the relevant excerpt from cpython/Lib/test/test_builtin.py

def test_all(self):
    self.assertEqual(all([2, 4, 6]), True)
    self.assertEqual(all([2, None, 6]), False)
    self.assertRaises(RuntimeError, all, [2, TestFailingBool(), 6])
    self.assertRaises(RuntimeError, all, TestFailingIter())
    self.assertRaises(TypeError, all, 10)               # Non-iterable
    self.assertRaises(TypeError, all)                   # No args
    self.assertRaises(TypeError, all, [2, 4, 6], [])    # Too many args
    self.assertEqual(all([]), True)                     # Empty iterator
    S = [50, 60]
    self.assertEqual(all(x > 42 for x in S), True)
    S = [50, 40, 60]
    self.assertEqual(all(x > 42 for x in S), False)

def test_any(self):
    self.assertEqual(any([None, None, None]), False)
    self.assertEqual(any([None, 4, None]), True)
    self.assertRaises(RuntimeError, any, [None, TestFailingBool(), 6])
    self.assertRaises(RuntimeError, all, TestFailingIter())
    self.assertRaises(TypeError, any, 10)               # Non-iterable
    self.assertRaises(TypeError, any)                   # No args
    self.assertRaises(TypeError, any, [2, 4, 6], [])    # Too many args
    self.assertEqual(any([]), False)                    # Empty iterator
    S = [40, 60, 30]
    self.assertEqual(any(x > 42 for x in S), True)
    S = [10, 20, 30]
    self.assertEqual(any(x > 42 for x in S), False)

It doesn't do anything to enforce the shortcircuit behaviour


Solution

  • The behaviour is guaranteed. I've contributed a patch, which was accepted and merged recently, so if you grab the latest sources you will see that the short-circuiting behaviour is now explicitly enforced.

    git clone https://github.com/python/cpython.git
    grep Short-circuit cpython/Lib/test/test_builtin.py