Working on closing out some bug reports at work, and I ran into one about comparisons to 'None' will result in elementwise object comparison in the future. Now, I totally get the idea behind the change, and I am not here to argue that decision. However, I have come across a situation where the change might have an unexpected negative consequence.

Consider the following:

        p = Pool(min(len(tiles), maxprocs))
        res = p.map(_wrap_tilesum, izip(repeat(args.varname),
                                        tiles,
                                        repeat(request_start),
                                        repeat(args.timeLen),
                                        repeat(args.srcdir),
                                        repeat(args.tarredInputs),
                                        repeat(args.dataset)))
        p.close()
        p.join()

        (tiles, tile_start_dates, tile_end_dates,
                tile_lons, tile_lats) = zip(*res)

        if None in tiles:
            logging.critical("At least one tile was invalid. Aborting")
            raise Exception("Invalid data retrieved!")

Essentailly, in the nominal case, "tiles" would be a list of numpy arrays. However, my error handling is such that if one of my subprocesses errors out, then it returns a None instead of a numpy array. So, all I am doing is testing to see if any of the items in the "tiles" list is None. I have zero desire to actually compare None with the elements in the arrays that happens to be in the list.

Of course, I can rewrite this if statement as `any(tile is None for tile in tiles)`, but that isn't my point. Is `if None in tiles:` an unreasonable idiom?

Cheers!
Ben Root