Why comparison return an integer instead of a boolean?

Question

I was testing some piece of code

True = 2
print 1 - (1 == 1)
print True == (1 == 1)

Then I was expecting:

-1
True

But I got this instead:

0
False

So, I did what any python programmer would do: disassemble it.

def f():
    True = 2
    print 1 - (1 == 1)
    print True == (1 == 1)

2           0 LOAD_CONST               1 (2)
            3 STORE_FAST               0 (True)

3           6 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
            9 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
           12 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
           15 COMPARE_OP               2 (==)
           18 BINARY_SUBTRACT     
           19 PRINT_ITEM          
           20 PRINT_NEWLINE       

4          21 LOAD_FAST                0 (True)
           24 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
           27 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
           30 COMPARE_OP               2 (==)
           33 COMPARE_OP               2 (==)
           36 PRINT_ITEM          
           37 PRINT_NEWLINE       
           38 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
           41 RETURN_VALUE        

Then it was a bit clear, is using the COMPARE_OP (==). Witch should return a boolean but it appears that it returns a integer instead. Any ideas why?

Edit:

In short the lesson learned: Changing the values of True or False doesn't change how the boolean logic is represented behind the scene.

Answer 1

In Python, bool is a subclass of int, and False and True have the equivalent values of 0 and 1 respectively. Also, __eq__() can return any object it likes; it just so happens that for built-in types it returns bool instances.