On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 12:53 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

Because it's relatively rare to not use the loop variable for anything
(even if it's just a debug message), and in the cases where you
genuinely don't use it, a standard idiom can be applied (using a
single or double underscore as a dummy variable), rather than all
future users of the language needing to learn a special case syntax.

I think "relatively rare" is rather subjective, it's surely not everyday stuff but that doesn't mean it's not done often.

And instead of learning a special syntax, which is simple and easy to understand when they google "repeat many times python", they now end up learning a special semantic by naming the variable with an underscore. If and when someone asks "how to repeat many times in Python", I'd rather answer "use repeat_for X" instead of "use for _ in range(X)"