Is there a builtin function version of `and` and/or `or` in Python?

Question

This question is for fun; I don't expect the answer to be useful.

When I see people doing things with reduce() in Python, they often take advantage of a builtin function in Python, often from the operator module.

This works:

result = reduce(lambda a, b: a + b, range(5))

But usually you would see this:

from operator import add
result = reduce(add, range(5))

What's strange to me is that the operator module doesn't seem to have a function for logical and. It does have bitwise and, but not logical and.

So suppose you are doing this:

result = reduce(lambda a, b: a and b, range(1, 6))

Is there a builtin function that can be used here?

I'm also wondering if there is a builtin function that can replace or.

If you map the arguments to Booleans first, you can use the bitwise and from operator, or just directly use bool.__and__, like so:

from operator import and_
result = reduce(and_, map(bool, range(1, 6)))
result = reduce(bool.__and__, map(bool, range(1, 6)))

And likewise with operator.or_() or bool.__or__ for the or operation. But I am looking for a function that doesn't need the values mapped to Booleans.

If you knew for certain that your values are all integers, you could use operator.mul for and and operator.add for or. This would be a crude hack and I don't want this answer... especially considering how expensive the multiplications would get if many numbers were encountered and none of them were zero!

Note: I am aware of all() and any(), which are better replacements for this use of reduce(). As I said at the top, I'm asking this for fun.

Note: A function that has the side-effect of forcing all values to bool would be an acceptable answer. The built-in and keyword doesn't do this:

x = 3 and 5  # sets x to 5, not to True

But for the purpose of this question I am just interested in a function that can work with reduce() to do logical and or or operations.

Answer 1

I guess the actual reason why there's no and and or in the operator module is that it's impossible to evaluate function arguments in a short-circuit fashion - which is the whole point of boolean operators. So the answer to your question is no, there's no built-in function that can mimic and/or nor is it possible to write one.

all/any applied to generators are short-circuiting as well

def gen():
    yield 1
    yield this_wont_be_evaluated

print any(gen())

but I have no idea how make that work with run-time arguments

Answer 2

There are no builtin functions I'm aware of that do this. However, you can define trivial functions that wrap around the operators:

>>> def newand(a,b):
...  return a and b
...
>>> def newor(a,b):
...  return a or b
...
>>> reduce(newand, map(bool, range(5))) # Will return False, because bool(0) == False
False
>>> reduce(newand, map(bool, range(1,5))) # Now 0 is excluded
True