Why does 123 < list evaluate to True? Or list < 123 to False? Or list < dict to True?
More generally why do < or > not raise errors when a number is compared to a function, a list or such things? What's the logic behind this design choice?
(note that this is in Python 2.7, it might not be true in Python 3 I didn't try it yet)
In Python2, the docs say:
CPython implementation detail: Objects of different types except numbers are ordered by their type names; objects of the same types that don’t support proper comparison are ordered by their address.
In Python3, this wart is fixed:
The ordering comparison operators (<, <=, >=, >) raise a TypeError exception when the operands don’t have a meaningful natural ordering. Thus, expressions like 1 < '', 0 > None or len <= len are no longer valid, and e.g. None < None raises TypeError instead of returning False. A corollary is that sorting a heterogeneous list no longer makes sense – all the elements must be comparable to each other. Note that this does not apply to the == and != operators: objects of different incomparable types always compare unequal to each other.
The comparison in such cases is done on the bases of type() of the objects:
for example : type(123) is 'int' and type(list) is 'list', so the string comparison of 'int'<'list' returns to be True
>>> 123<list
True
>>> type(123)<type(list)
True
