How "and" And "or" Operators work with 0 and 1 and numbers like 2,3,4etc

Question

I am using python 3.6.1 .

Question 1:

A)

False and 0 # gives False, but   

0 and False # gives 0 (both answers must be False)

like that

False or 0 # gives 0, but

0 or False # gives False (both answers must be False)

Why is it not giving all results as False but give the one result as 0 (in number)?

Likewise

B)

True and 1 # gives 1, but

1 and True # gives True

Why aren't all results in case 'B' True and 1st one gives 1? Why is it giving integers 1 and 0 as result (case A and B)? Is there any thing like direction in this?

Question 2:

Do numbers other than or 0 & 1 like 2,3,4,-2,-3 represent False or True in any way?

C)

True == 1 # gives True 

True == 2 # gives False, but

True and 2 # gives False.

D)

False or 2 # gives 2

2 or False # gives 2

Are the other integers like 2,3 etc taken as False? Why is it output in case D 2 and not True or False?

Answer 1

and and or are boolean operators and their behaviour is explained in the documentation:

The expression x and y first evaluates x; if x is false, its value is returned; otherwise, y is evaluated and the resulting value is returned.

The expression x or y first evaluates x; if x is true, its value is returned; otherwise, y is evaluated and the resulting value is returned.

If these were functions they would look like (roughly) like this:

def and_function(x, y):
    if bool(x) == False:  # if x is false, its value is returned
        return x
    else:                 # otherwise, y is evaluated and the resulting value is returned
        return y     

def or_function(x, y):
    if bool(x) == True:  # if x is true, its value is returned
        return x     
    else:                # otherwise, y is evaluated and the resulting value is returned.
        return y     

So these will always evaluate to either x or y, depending on the truth-value of the left side.

In this context "evaluate" refers to the expression not the boolean value. So x or somefunction() wouldn't evaluate the somefunction() if bool(x) == True. That's where the function equivalent fails because these functions don't postpone the evaluation of the expression. So don't take these two functions too seriously. They were only meant as explanation helpers.

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The truth-value testing documentation explains how the truth-value of numbers is defined:

[...] The following values are considered false:

• False

• zero of any numeric type, for example, 0, 0.0, 0j.

• [...]

All other values are considered true — so objects of many types are always true.

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Then you asked about equality between the booleans True and False and numbers. To understand this you have to know that bools are a subclass of integers in Python. In some sense True is just another name for 1 and False for 0. So it's not surprising that True == 1 and False == 0 are both True.

NB: If you come from other languages it might be important to state that there is no implicit casting for comparisons in Python, I explained this in another answer in more details: "Why does … == True return False?".