On May 11, 11:41 pm, Ben Finney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Carl Banks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > On May 11, 6:44 pm, Ben Finney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > wrote: > > > In such cases, the name 'dummy' is conventionally bound to the items > > > from the iterator, for clarity of purpose:: > > > > for dummy in range(10): > > > # do stuff that makes no reference to 'dummy' > > > Is this documented? > > It's not a documented standard, to my knowledge. > > > I've never heard of this convention. It's not PEP 8, and I've never > > seen consistent usage of any name. I'd be interested in knowing > > where you read that this was a convention, or in what subcommunities > > it's a convention in. > > It has been in this forum that the use of the name '_' for "don't care > about the value" was deprecated, since that name is already overloaded > with other meanings.
That doesn't follow at all from what you wrote: no one in this thread had even mentioned the usage of "_" for unused values--how did you expect us to know you were talking about something no one brought up? So it seems that usage of "dummy" is not a convention, and avoidance of "_" is not really a convention except on this group. > > I think dummy is a terrible name to use for this, since in no other > > usage I can think of does the word "dummy" suggest something isn't > > used. > > I think it's far superior to '_'. I'd be just as happy with any other > name that explicitly distinguishes itself for this purpose. > > > If a value isn't used, then I think the most clear name for it is > > "unused". > > Sounds good to me. Now we merely need to convince the world. I'm happy to discourage the world from using "_" for this purpose; ambivalent whether you even need to use a specific name. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
