Question

I found something strange while debugging some code. Apparently,

>>> (0-6) is -6
False

but,

>>> (0-5) is -5
True

Why does this happen?

Answer 1

All integers from -5 to 256 inclusive are cached as global objects sharing the same address with CPython, thus the is test passes.

This artifact is explained in detail in http://www.laurentluce.com/posts/python-integer-objects-implementation/, and we could check the current source code in http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Objects/longobject.c.

A specific structure is used to refer small integers and share them so access is fast. It is an array of 262 pointers to integer objects. Those integer objects are allocated during initialization in a block of integer objects we saw above. The small integers range is from -5 to 256. Many Python programs spend a lot of time using integers in that range so this is a smart decision.

This is only an implementation detail of CPython and you shouldn’t rely on this. For instance, PyPy implemented the id of integer to return itself, so (0-6) is -6 is always true even if they are “different objects” internally; it also allows you to configure whether to enable this integer caching, and even set the lower and upper bounds. But in general, objects retrieved from different origins will not be identical. If you want to compare equality, just use ==.