Ruby has a neat little convenience when writing loops where you don't
care about the loop index: you just do n.times do { ... some
code ... } where n is an integer representing how many times you want
to execute "some code."In Python, the direct translation of this is a for loop. When the index doesn't matter to me, I tend to write it as: for _ in xrange (1,n): some code An alternative way of indicating that you don't care about the loop index would be for dummy in xrange (1,n): some code But I like using _ because it's only 1 character and communicates well the idea "I don't care about this variable." The only potential disadvantages I can see are threefold: 1. It might be a little jarring to people not used to it. I do admit it looks pretty strange at first. 2. The variable _ has special meaning at the interactive interpreter prompt. There may be some confusion because of this. 5. Five is right out. (ob Holy Grail reference, of course. :-) So, I guess I'm wondering if anyone else uses a similar idiom and if there are any downsides to it that I'm not aware of. Thanks Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
