[issue21234] __contains__ and friends should check "is" for all elements first

[Wolfgang Maier]

Wolfgang Maier added the comment:

that clarifies things, thanks.

I would still not usually go that way though as it means defining __ne__ with no accompanying __eq__, which means that, in a simple case, you can't use == on instances of your class and, in the case that your class inherits __eq__ from a parent, that == and != give inconsistent answers.

A much simpler solution is to not use the x in y idiom if you know it is slowed down by expensive equality checks in the elements of y and you're only interested in the identity check.
Simply replace it with

any(element is x for element in y)

, which will run at decent speed.

A quick illustration:

class myObj(object):
    def __eq__(self, other):
        for i in range(10000): pass # simulate an expensive check
        return False

l=[myObj() for x in range(10000)]

now compare:

>>> 1 in m # slowed down by myObj.__eq__
False

>>> any(e is 1 for e in m) # identity checks only
False

=> no class-level hacking required, but still a good performance gain.
Of course, if you really need bets performance with identity *and* equality checks, then your solution may make sense, but that looks like a pretty special requirement.
(and even then I would replace the ugly

not all(map(ne, repeat(obj), container)) # requires 2 imports to be so hard to read

with:

not all(element != obj for element in container)
)

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue21234>
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