Interview gone wrong

I have a very basic question which I usually ask in a interview which is to implement a tic tac toe game. I like this because the logic is straightforward and it helps to judge things like code quality / speed / conciseness etc.

The candidate this time was programming in python and had put a statement to figure out if we have a winner by checking if all the elements in the diagonal position are the same.

if (cell[0][0] == cell[1][1] == cell[2][2]) {
    return Winner
}

cell[x][y] can contain a char where the value would be either '-' or 'X' or 'Y'

I didn't want to nit pick but it felt that the statement even though logical, is not technically right, because if we start from the left cell[0][0] == cell[1][1] would evaluate to True and then True == cell[2][2] would evaluate to False given that the cell contains a char.

And this is how it would definitely happen if the code was written in javascript

I told the candidate about the same and he agreed but he was confused at the same time stating that he has used / seen this expression multiple times in the existing codebase.

After the interview I found out Python has a thing called chained expressions when you write something like the above, it gets transformed to the later statement given below :

if (cell[0][0] == cell[1][1] == cell[2][2]) {
    return Winner
}

if ((cell[0][0] == cell[1][1]) and (cell[1][1] == cell[2][2])) {
    return Winner
}

Well the code is indeed correct 🤷. Well done, Python… for finding yet another way to confuse us all.