In [20]: print None or False
-------> print(None or False)
False
In [21]: print False or None
-------> print(False or None)
None
This behaviour confuses me. Could someone explain to me why is this happening like this? I expected them to both behave the same.
6 Answers
The expression x or y evaluates to x if x is true, or y if x is false.
Note that "true" and "false" in the above sentence are talking about "truthiness", not the fixed values True and False. Something that is "true" makes an if statement succeed; something that's "false" makes it fail. "false" values include False, None, 0 and [] (an empty list).
The or operator returns the value of its first operand, if that value is true in the Pythonic boolean sense (aka its "truthiness"), otherwise it returns the value of its second operand, whatever it happens to be. See the subsection titled Boolean operations in the section on Expressions in the current online documentation.
In both your examples, the first operand is considered false, so the value of the second one becomes the result of evaluating the expression.
EXPLANATION
You must realize that True, False, and None are all singletons in Python, which means that there exist and can only exist one, single instance of a singleton object, hence the name singleton. Also, you can't modify a singleton object because its state is set in stone, if I may use that phrase.
Now, let me explain how those Python singletons are meant to be used.
Let's have a Python object named foo that has a value None, then if foo is not None is saying that foo has a value other than None. This works the same as saying if foo, which is basically if foo == True.
So, not None and True work the same way, as well as None and False.
>>> foo = not None
>>> bool(foo)
True
>>> foo = 5 # Giving an arbitrary value here
>>> bool(foo)
True
>>> foo = None
>>> bool(foo)
False
>>> foo = 5 # Giving an arbitrary value here
>>> bool(foo)
True
The critical thing to realize and be aware of when coding is that when comparing two objects, None needs is, but True and False need ==. Avoid using if foo == None, only use if foo is None. Also, avoid using if foo != None and only use if foo is not None.
