easy question on parsing python: "is not None"

[Thomas Jollans]

On 08/07/2010 09:44 AM, Gabriel Genellina wrote:
> En Sat, 07 Aug 2010 04:04:06 -0300, Stefan Schwarzer
> <sschwarzer at sschwarzer.net> escribió:
>> On 2010-08-07 00:28, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 
>>> Actually, yes, equality is implemented with a short-cut
> that checks for
>>> identity first. That makes something like:
>>> [...]
>>
>> Oops, I didn't realize that the OP had mentioned the
>> identity check as an optimization in case the objects are
>> the same. I thought he was confusing the operator with `is`.
>>
>>> s = "abc"*1000*1000*10
>>> s == s
>>>
>>> nice and quick, as Python can immediately recognise that a string is
>>> always equal to itself without having to walk the entire string
>>> comparing
>>> each character with itself.
>>
>> Yes, that definitely makes sense. I guess I would have
>> implemented it this way as well. :)
> 
> For strings and other internal types this optimization certainly makes
> sense. For user-defined types it gets in the way and prevents defining
> an object such x==x is False (like NANs).
> 

That's probably why this optimisation doesn't exist for user-defined types:

Python 3.1.2 (release31-maint, Jul  8 2010, 09:18:08)
[GCC 4.4.4] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
>>> class A:
...     def __eq__(self, x):
...         if self is x: return False
...         else: return True
...
>>>
>>> A() == A()
True
>>> a = A()
>>> a == a
False
>>>