[swisniewski]

Sigh…

Saying the code doesn’t have conditions or booleans is only true if you completely ignore how the functions being called are being implemented.

Cycle involves conditionals, zip involves conditionals, range involves conditionals, array access involves conditionals, the string concatenation involves conditionals, the iterator expansion in the for loop involves conditionals.

This has orders of magnitude more conditionals than normal fizz buzz would.

Even the function calls involve conditionals (python uses dynamic dispatch). Even if call site caching is used to avoid repeated name lookups, that involves conditionals.

There is not a line of code in that file (even the import statement) that does not use at least one conditional.

So… interesting implementation, but it’s not “fizzbuzz without booleans or conditionals”.

[swisniewski]

Not sure why this got downvoted.

The technique could be implemented without conditionals, but not in python, and not using iterators.

You could do it in C, and use & and ~ to make the cyclic counters work.

But, like I mentioned, the code in the article is very far from being free of conditionals.

[abustamam]

I didn't down vote, but it does seem like unnecessary pedantry. Maybe it could be better phrased as "without writing any conditionals"

[kstrauser]

I think that’s kind of vacuously true. Like, good luck writing this in any language where the resulting assembler all the way at the bottom of the runtime has zero branch operations. And I bet even then that most CPUs’ microcode or superscalar engine would have conditionals underlying the opcodes.

I’d settle for just not writing conditionals in the user’s own code. Range doesn’t have to be implemented with branches. Hypothetically, Python could prefill a long list of ints, and range could return the appropriate slice of it. That’d be goofy, of course, but the main idea is that the user doesn’t know or really care exactly how range() was written and optimized.