[Python-Dev] best practices stdlib: purging xrange

[Guido van Rossum]

On 5/8/07, Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes.org> wrote:
> On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 09:14:02AM +1000, Anthony Baxter wrote:
> > I'd like to suggest that we remove all (or nearly all) uses of
> > xrange from the stdlib. A quick scan shows that most of the usage
> > of it is unnecessary. With it going away in 3.0, and it being
> > informally deprecated anyway, it seems like a good thing to go away
> > where possible.
>
> The first step is to focus the question on the places where replacing
> xrange() with range() can really make no difference at all, as far as we
> can see.  This is not the case of "nearly all" the uses of xrange() from
> the stdlib - but it's still the case of a number of them:
>
>     ''.join(chr(x) for x in xrange(256))     # at global module level
>
> or:
>
>     for i in xrange(self.firstweekday, self.firstweekday + 7):
>
> I personally think that replacing these with range() is a clean-up, but
> I also know that not everybody agrees to that.  So: should we, or should
> we not, replace xrange() with range() as a matter of clean-up when the
> difference between the two is really completely irrelevant?

I'm all for that -- personally, I wouldn't have written xrange() in
the first place in such cases!

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)