Check if all the elements of a Julia array are equal

The shortest way I can think of to test whether all the elements in an array arr are equal is all(arr[1] .== arr). While this is certainly short, it seems a bit inelegant. Is there a built-in function that does this?

I suspect there's something along the lines of ==(arr...), but that doesn't work because the == operator can only take two arguments. I'm not sure how Julia parses expressions like arr[1] == arr[2] == arr[3], but is there some way to adapt this to an array with an arbitrary number of elements?

Solution

Great question @tparker and great answer @ColinTBowers. While trying to think about them both, it occurred to me to try the straight-forward old-school Julian way-of-the-for-loop. The result was faster on the important input of a long vector of identical elements, so I'm adding this note. Also, the function name allequal seems to be appropriate enough to mention. So here are the variants:

allequal_1(x) = all(y->y==x[1],x)

# allequal_2(x) used to be erroneously defined as foldl(==,x)   

@inline function allequal_3(x)
    length(x) < 2 && return true
    e1 = x[1]
    i = 2
    @inbounds for i=2:length(x)
        x[i] == e1 || return false
    end
    return true
end

And the benchmark:

julia> using BenchmarkTools

julia> v = fill(1,10_000_000);  # long vector of 1s

julia> allequal_1(v)
true

julia> allequal_3(v)
true

julia> @btime allequal_1($v);
  9.573 ms (1 allocation: 16 bytes)

julia> @btime allequal_3($v);
  6.853 ms (0 allocations: 0 bytes)

UPDATE: Another important case to benchmark is when there is a short-circuit opportunity. So (as requested in commment):

julia> v[100] = 2
2

julia> allequal_1(v),allequal_2(v),allequal_3(v)
(false, false, false)

julia> @btime allequal_1($v);
  108.946 ns (1 allocation: 16 bytes)

julia> @btime allequal_3($v);
  68.221 ns (0 allocations: 0 bytes)

All things being equal, a for version should get to be allequal in Base.