python boolean list_Python Bool and int comparison and indexing on list with boolean values

What's going on is that booleans actually are integers. True is 1 and False is 0. Bool is a subtype of int.

>>> isinstance(True, int)

True

>>> issubclass(bool, int)

True

So it's not converting them to integers, it's just using them as integers.

(Bools are ints for historical reasons. Before a bool type existed in Python, people used the integer 0 to mean false and 1 to mean true. So when they added a bool type, they made the boolean values integers in order to maintain backward compatibility with old code that used these integer values. See for instance http://www.peterbe.com/plog/bool-is-int .)

>>> help(True)

Help on bool object:

class bool(int)

| bool(x) -> bool

|

| Returns True when the argument x is true, False otherwise.

| The builtins True and False are the only two instances of the class bool.

| The class bool is a subclass of the class int, and cannot be subclassed.