Honestly, Python's way is the only sane way to parse this. This is how a human who never programmed before with some knowledge of math would understand it.
Everyone's else mind is just corrupted by broken legacy languages.
if a == 2 or 3:
do stuff
>>> a=16
>>> a*a is a*a
True
>>> a=17
>>> a*a is a*a
False
The objects for small integers are built-in and static, but 17^2 is too big, and so new integer objects are created when the expressions are evaluated. "is" checks if two expressions represent the same object in memory. "==" checks for equality of values.