PEP 284, Integer for-loops

[Tim Legant]

James_Althoff at i2.com writes:

[...]

> I just did the same for a small section of our code.  My quick little scan
> turned up 293 uses of [x]range.  Most -- as in nearly all -- of them are in
> for-loops and *are* used in conjunction with the indices of collections.
> 
> Our mileage might be different from others because our use of Jython is for
> large-scale, shipping, production-level, commercial applications rather
> than for small, throw-away scripts or core-language libraries.  Also (as
> mentioned) we use Jython and have to deal with tables and other kinds of
> collections written in Java outside the scope of core C-Python.  So I guess
> we lose.

Out of curiosity I ran a couple of quick greps over the TMDA source.
TMDA doesn't really fall into either of your "alternative" categories;
it's small, but definitely not throwaway and it's an application, not
a core library.  It's a mail processor to eliminate SPAM.  However,
it's pure Python; there's no integration with C or Java.

The results were that I found 52 or 53 'for' loops (scanned the
results of the grep by eye, since the word 'for' appears in comments
as well) and exactly no uses of [x]range at all.

So either Jason and I are significantly better than you and your team
at expressing ourselves naturally in Python <wink> or it's the need to
interface with Java that's forcing you to use integer indices all the
time.  I'm betting big money on the latter.


Tim