I should probably be silent on the issue of picking names for things, but I feel that 'iter' is an unfortunte choice for a function name: it is an abbreviated word. Now, you could argue that there is plenty of precedent for that in Python, but some of these are also confusing. Just today, I asked colleague what he thought 'repr' might do, and he had no clue. Anyway, I've been browsing dictionaries somewhat, and here are a few proposals, taking a well-known dictionary as an argument: harp(sys.modules) # or harp_on(sys.modules)? traverse(sys.modules) # not shorter than iterate, though... narrate(sys.modules) Of course, spelling-out "iterate" would be just as fine. Just my 0.02EUR, Martin