C's !! double negation idiom is a way of compressing all non-zero values of an expression down into a 1. There's a number of things that you can use to get the same effect in Python:

• if you know that your result is always zero or positive, you can use cmp() . I'm ambivalent about whether this is obscure usage; you're at least making it clear what you're doing, although probably not why.

  (If your result can be negative, you can use abs(cmp(...)) .)

• the minimalist version is just bool(...) , because (currently) True and False can be directly used in arithmetic expressions.
• writing int(bool(...)) has the same effect but makes it clear to readers (and programs like pylint and pychecker) that you're doing this deliberately.

I'm not sure which one I like better. Consider an expression like:

nbytes = nbits // 8 + int(bool(nbits % 8))

My C heritage says that this version is the clearest (and indeed it's the first one I thought of). I'd have to pause to think about the cmp() version, partly because I've yet to memorize which way cmp() 's arguments run so I always have to think about what its result will be.

I suspect that none of these would be considered good Python style, and that the proper Pythonic way to do this is to just use an if , or to write the whole thing as math.ceil(nbits / 8.0) and trust that floating point precision is not going to bite you.

(For some reason I have a small addiction to little overly clever Python idioms like this.)