[julia-users] Are Base.any() and Base.all() optimal?

[Pablo San-Jose]

Hi all,

this is my first post here. I'm a heavy Mathematica user, and a big fan of 
Julia. Many thanks to all the great minds involved in creating this 
beautiful thing! I am planning to doing a port of all my Mathematica 
packages (on quantum transport) to Julia.

My very first question:

Say I want to test whether any item generated by an iterator (that 
generates integers, but that may involve heavy calculations) equals zero. I 
assumed Base.any() would be the function to use. However, if I do this:

function test(x)
>   @show x
>   x==0
> end
> any(test,-5:5)


I see that test is applied to *all* elements of the iterator before 
deciding that at least one element is zero. This is clearly not optimal. 
Why is this? Is this a bug?

(The same question applies to Base.all())

Thanks!