John Posner <jjpos...@snet.net> writes:
> 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 )
This is the same as:
return not all(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
--
Arnaud
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