short-circuiting any/all ?

[Jean-Michel Pichavant]

kj wrote:
>
> I have a list of items L, and a test function is_invalid that checks
> the validity of each item.  To check that there are no invalid
> items in L, I could check the value of any(map(is_invalid, L)).
> But this approach is suboptimal in the sense that, no matter what
> L is, is_invalid will be executed for all elements of L, even though
> the value returned by any() is fully determined by the first True
> in its argument.  In other words, all calls to is_invalid after
> the first one to return True are superfluous.  Is there a
> short-circuiting counterpart to any(map(is_invalid, L)) that avoids
> these superfluous calls?
>
> OK, there's this one, of course:
>
> def _any_invalid(L):
>     for i in L:
>         if is_invalid(i):
>             return True
>     return False   
>
> But is there anything built-in?  (I imagine that a lazy version of
> map *may* do the trick, *if* any() will let it be lazy.)
>
> TIA!
>
> ~K
>   
Sounds like unnecessary optimization. Just write

def _any_valid(L):
    return bool([i for i in L if is_valid(i)])

If you really care about speed, meaning if the user experiences some 
execution duration increase, then the solution you proposed is fine.


JM