Equal to Anything

[Simon Brunning]

For the purposes of a little test utility that we use, I need an
object that evaluates as equal to anything. (I realise that this is a
bad idea in some ways, breaking the equals/hashcode invariant and so
forth, but I'm hoping that I can get away with it in this case.) It
seems a simple enough task at first:

>>class EqualAnything(object):

.... def __eq__(self, other):
.... return True
....

>>spam = EqualAnything()
spam == 1

True

>>spam == "hello!"

True

>>spam == datetime.datetime.now()

True

>>1 == spam

True

>>"hello!" == spam

True

But...

>>datetime.datetime.now() == spam

False

I'm fairly sure that I know what is going on here - the left hand side
object is getting first stab at the equality test, and understandably,
it's saying "Nah". But is there anything that I can do about it?

--
Cheers,
Simon B,
si***@brunningonline.net
http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/

[Duncan Booth]

"Simon Brunning" <si***@brunningonline.netwrote:

I'm fairly sure that I know what is going on here - the left hand side
object is getting first stab at the equality test, and understandably,
it's saying "Nah". But is there anything that I can do about it?

Not in general, no. If you could, and someone else created a
NotEqualAnything class with the identical definition to EqualAnything
except it returns False, then which would win?

Sorry, but the left hand value wins unless it volunteers otherwise.