Interesting. I suppose that could be added as an extra argument against those who claim that [0,1,2,3,4,5] is *NOT* the sequence of integers "obviously" associated with the number 6. As for me, even before I started using Python I had already become convinced of that.
PEP 276 is worth a second look. In fact, it's trivial to implement, and what it REALLY needs is a champion to bring it up with the BDFL (and others). [snip example] is simple and elegant. And while at first glance it seems like allowing iteration over ints would open up all kinds of subtle bugs, I find that the PEP does a good job of arguing that it doesn't.
While PEP 276 attempts to make easier the most common iteration over integers (half open, 0...n-1), PEP 284 takes care of general iteration over integers (a...b, for arbitrary integer a and b, incrementing or decrementing as necessary). In this case, does practicality (usable for more integer iteration scenarios) outweigh the purity (integer fields/list indices)? - Josiah