Why does python `any` return a bool instead of the value?

Question

and and or return the last element they evaluated, but why doesn\'t Python\'s built-in function any?

I mean it\'s pretty easy

Answer 1

It's not immediately obvious that any's value could be either False or one of the values in the input. Also, most uses would look like

tmp = any(iterable)
if tmp:
   tmp.doSomething()
else:
   raise ValueError('Did not find anything')

That's Look Before You Leap and therefore unpythonic. Compare to:

next(i for i in iterable if i).doSomething()
# raises StopIteration if no value is true

The behavior of and and or was historically useful as a drop-in for the then-unavailable conditional expression.