Question

I was testing some piece of code

True = 2
print 1 - (1 == 1)
print True == (1 == 1)

Then I was expecting:

-1
True

But I got this instead:

0
False

So, I did what any python programmer would do: disassemble it.

def f():
    True = 2
    print 1 - (1 == 1)
    print True == (1 == 1)

2           0 LOAD_CONST               1 (2)
            3 STORE_FAST               0 (True)

3           6 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
            9 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
           12 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
           15 COMPARE_OP               2 (==)
           18 BINARY_SUBTRACT     
           19 PRINT_ITEM          
           20 PRINT_NEWLINE       

4          21 LOAD_FAST                0 (True)
           24 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
           27 LOAD_CONST               2 (1)
           30 COMPARE_OP               2 (==)
           33 COMPARE_OP               2 (==)
           36 PRINT_ITEM          
           37 PRINT_NEWLINE       
           38 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
           41 RETURN_VALUE        

Then it was a bit clear, is using the COMPARE_OP (==). Witch should return a boolean but it appears that it returns a integer instead. Any ideas why?

Edit:

In short the lesson learned: Changing the values of True or False doesn’t change how the boolean logic is represented behind the scene.

Answer 1

It seems to me that your misunderstanding was in thinking that treating True like a variable would actually change the results of boolean operations. It doesn’t. True is used by default to respresent, well, boolean truth, but it loses that functionality when you changes its value. However, that doesn’t change the rules for how booleans are treated with respect to integers.