The danger here is that this will fall through to the falseaction if trueaction returns a false result ("", False, 0, None, [], {}, etc). For example, this wil

The danger here is that this will fall through to the falseaction if trueaction returns a false result ("", False, 0, None, [], {}, etc). For example, this will evaluate to "etc": True and "" or "etc" So people started doing this instead, as [False] is still 'true' (non-empty lists are 'true' in Python): (condition and [trueaction] or [falseaction])[0] ... which is a bit crufty. So this was added: trueaction if condition else falseaction