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Newcomer struggling with tutorial

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Sun Oct 5 00:39:50 EDT 2003 
"CPK Smithies" <cpks at NOSPAM.btopenworld.com> wrote in message
news:blo2gb$ng0$1 at hercules.btinternet.com...
> from the Tutorial:
>
> > Comparisons can be chained. For example, a < b == c tests whether
a is
> > less than b and moreover b equals c.

This means that a < b == c is equivalent to
(a < b) and (b == c) and not
(a < b) == c., which is something else.

Chained operators are *not* 'associative' -- you cannot insert parens
unless you so for each overlapping pair of args and insert 'and'
between each.

> I threw a mental wobbly and wasted two hours over this:
>
> a = -1
> b = 77
> c =  1
>
> (a < b)
>  True
>
> True == c
>  True

For a < b == c, the second test Python makes is b==c (False).
But this matches for your next test.

> (a < b) == c
>  False

For 2.2.1 (which does not have True/False on Windows .
>>> a,b,c = -1, 77, 1
>>> a < b
1
>>> (a < b) == 1
1

What version/machine were you running?  Please cut and paste actual
output.  If you have really discovered a bug in current Python, we
would want to know and fix it.

> Unfortunately I was brought up with the belief that if A == B and B
== C,
> then A should == C.

Why 'unfortunately'?  For builtin objects, this is true in Python.

> I confess that after two hours worrying about this I have given up
on
> Python and uninstalled it. A shame: it looked so good!

If you really did that, it was a real shame.

Terry J. Reedy
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