On Feb 5, 2008 1:30 PM, Nick Craig-Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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 > > I use pychecker a lot. It views variables called [ '_', 'unused', > 'empty', 'dummy' ] as names to ignore if they haven't been used. > > So according to pychecker '_' and 'dummy' would both be OK. > > As for me personally, I usually use '_' but sometimes use 'dummy' > depending on the surrounding code. > > Note that this idiom is fairly common in python too > > wanted, _, _, _, also_wanted = a_list > > which looks quite neat to my eyes. >
BTW and FWIW, in Py3k you can do: wanted, *_, also_wanted = a_list http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3132/ -- http://www.advogato.org/person/eopadoan/ Bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/edcrypt -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list