and [True,True] --> [True, True]?????

[John Posner]

jazbees wrote:

 > I'm surprised to see that the use of min and max for element-wise
 > comparison with lists has not been mentioned.  When fed lists of True/
 > False values, max will return True if there is at least one True in
 > the list, while min will return False if there is at least one False.
 > Going back to the OP's initial example, one could wrap a min check on
 > each list inside another min.

I agree with Duncan Booth that any() is equivalent to -- and better than 
-- max() for handling boolean values. But what boolean-oriented function 
is equivalent to min()? How about this, which returns the negation of 
the min() result:

def at_least_one_false(value_list):
   """
   return True if at least one value in value_list is logically FALSE
   """
   return any( [not val for val in value_list] )

This works, but the short-circuit feature of any() is undermined by the 
process-the-whole-sequence behavior of the list comprehension. So, let's 
delete the square brackets, converting the list comprehension into a 
generator expression:

   return any( not val for val in value_list )

According to timeit.Timer.timeit(), this change improves performance 
from 14.59 seconds to 10.49 seconds, with a long value_list:

   [True]*20 + [False] + [True]*30

But the generator expression produces worse performance with a shorter 
value_list:

   [True]*2 + [False] + [True]*3