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From: Duncan Booth <duncan.booth@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: Equivalent code to the bool() built-in function
Date: 18 Apr 2011 10:01:22 GMT
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Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> wrote:

> So in Python 2.2, Python introduced two new built-in names, True and 
> False, with values 1 and 0 respectively:
> 
> [steve@sylar ~]$ python2.2
> Python 2.2.3 (#1, Aug 12 2010, 01:08:27)
> [GCC 4.1.2 20070925 (Red Hat 4.1.2-27)] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>> True, False
> (1, 0)
>>>> type(True)
><type 'int'>
> 

Also in Python 2.2 (and I think earlier but I don't have anything 
earlier to check) there was an interesting property that while all other 
integers from -1 to 99 were optimised to share a single instance, there 
were actually 2 instances of 0 and 1:

Python 2.2.3 (#1, Sep 26 2006, 18:12:26)
[GCC 3.2.3 20030502 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-56)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 2-1 is 1
1
>>> True is 1
0
>>> (True is 1) is 0
0
>>> (True is 1) is False
1

The code for the win32api made use of this fact to determine whether to 
pass int or bool types through to COM methods.

-- 
Duncan Booth http://kupuguy.blogspot.com