I've never liked that idea. Down with it! On 6/16/05, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger@verizon.net> wrote:
The principal use case was largely met by enumerate(). From PEP 276's rationale section:
""" A common programming idiom is to take a collection of objects and apply some operation to each item in the collection in some established sequential order. Python provides the "for in" looping control structure for handling this common idiom. Cases arise, however, where it is necessary (or more convenient) to access each item in an "indexed" collection by iterating through each index and accessing each item in the collection using the corresponding index. """
Also, while some nice examples are provided, the proposed syntax allows and encourages some horrid examples as well:
>>> for i in 3: print i 0 1 2
The backwards compatability section lists another problematic consequence; the following would stop being a syntax error and would become valid:
x, = 1
The proposal adds iterability to all integers but silently does nothing for negative values.
A minor additional concern is that floats are not given an equivalent capability (for obvious reasons) but this breaks symmetry with range/xrange which still accept float args.
Raymond
-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)