On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:16 PM, danieldelay <danielde...@gmail.com> wrote: > This function "firsttrue( )" could probably be used anywhere "any( )" is > used, but with the ability to retrieve the first element where bool(element) > is True, which may be sometimes usefull. > > I suppose that there is a reason for that, does anybody know it ?
Because it was designed as a replacement for "reduce(lambda x, y: x or y, iterable)". The problem arises when the iterable is empty. What false value should be returned? If the iterable is a sequence of bools, then None doesn't fit. If the iterable is a sequence of non-bool objects, then False doesn't fit. In the case of reduce, the problem is solved by explicitly specifying an initial value to be used when the sequence is empty, but I guess GVR didn't feel that was appropriate here. Cheers, Ian -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
