On Jan 9, 11:17 pm, Ben Finney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Diez B. Roggisch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > The underscore is used as "discarded" identifier. So maybe > > > for _ in xrange(10): > > ... > > The problem with the '_' name is that it is already well-known and > long-used existing convention for an entirely unrelated purpose: in > the 'gettext' i18n library, the '_' function to get the > locally-translated version of a text string. > > Since the number of programs that need to use something like 'gettext' > (and therefore use the '_' function) is likely only to increase, it > seems foolish to set one's program up for a conflict with that > established usage. > > I've seen 'dummy' used as a "don't care about this value" name in > other Python code. That seems more readable, more explicit, and less > likely to conflict with existing conventions. > Perhaps a "discarded" identifier should be any which is an underscore followed by digits.
A single leading underscore is already used for "private" identifiers, but they are usually an underscore followed by what would be a valid identifier by itself, eg. "_exit". The convention would then be: 2 underscores + valid_by_self + 2 underscores => special underscore + valid_by_self => private underscore + invalid_by_self => dummy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
