Hi all,

TL;DR: If nobody has concerns, I think we may give always returning boolean values for `any()` and `all()` a shot soon (for object input).

Today in the triage meeting, and generally once in a while it comes up that:

object_arr.any() object_arr.all()

should always return booleans. Currently we have for example:

>>> np.array([None, "string"], dtype=object).any() 'string'

while we return booleans for anything that isn't an object dtype.

Note that our logical reductions, which are used as an implementation:

np.logical_or.reduce() np.logical_and.reduce()

would still return the old result, so there would be a workaround available (although maybe hard to find).

One PR for this is:

https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/11857

And while I think that may need some tweaks, I think we may push something similar soon (with plenty of time to test before the release) if nobody voices concern.

Cheers,

Sebastian