Why is operator module missing `and` and `or`?

Question

operator module makes it easy to avoid unnecessary functions and lambdas in situations like this:

import operator

def mytest(op, list1, list2):
    ok = [op(i1,         


        

Answer 1

The reason there's no operator.and is that and is a keyword, so that would be a SyntaxError.

As tgh435 explained, the reason there's no renamed and function in operator is that it would be misleading: a function call always evaluates its operands, but the and operator doesn't. (It would also be an exception to an otherwise consistent and simple rule.)

---

In your case, it looks like you don't actually care about short-circuiting at all, so can build your own version trivially:

def and_(a, b):
    return a and b

Or, if you're just using it once, even inline:

mytest(lambda a, b: a and b, [-1, 2, -3], [1, -2, 33])

---

In some cases, it's worth looking at all (and, for or, any). It is effectively short-circuited and expanded to arbitrary operands. Of course it has a different API than the operator functions, taking a single iterable of operands instead of two separate operands. And the way it short-circuits is different; it just stops iterating the iterable, which only helps if you've set things up so the iterable is only evaluating things as needed. So, it's usually not usable as a drop-in replacement—but it's sometimes usable if you refactor your code a bit.