I think that’s kind of vacuously true. Like, good luck writing this in any language where the resulting assembler all the way at the bottom of the runtime has zero branch operations. And I bet even then that most CPUs’ microcode or superscalar engine would have conditionals underlying the opcodes.

I’d settle for just not writing conditionals in the user’s own code. Range doesn’t have to be implemented with branches. Hypothetically, Python could prefill a long list of ints, and range could return the appropriate slice of it. That’d be goofy, of course, but the main idea is that the user doesn’t know or really care exactly how range() was written and optimized.