Home check if all elements in a list are identical
 I need the following function: Input: a list Output: True if all elements in the input list evaluate as equal to each other using the standard equality operator; False otherwise. Performance: of course, I prefer not to incur any unnecessary overhead. I feel it would be best to: iterate through the list compare adjacent elements and AND all the resulting Boolean values But I'm not sure what's the most Pythonic way to do that. EDIT: Thank you for all the great answers. I rated up several, and it was really hard to choose between @KennyTM and @Ivo van der Wijk solutions. The lack of short-circuit feature only hurts on a long input (over ~50 elements) that have unequal elements early on. If this occurs often enough (how often depends on how long the lists might be), the short-circuit is required. The best short-circuit algorithm seems to be @KennyTM checkEqual1. It pays, however, a significant cost for this: up to 20x in performance nearly-identical lists up to 2.5x in performance on short lists If the long inputs with early unequal elements don't happen (or happen sufficiently rarely), short-circuit isn't required. Then, by far the fastest is @Ivo van der Wijk solution.