Does anyone else use this little idiom?

[miller.paul.w at gmail.com]

On Feb 3, 10:42 am, Zentrader <zentrad... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Not to me.  If I read "for _ in ...", I wouldn't be quite sure what _ was.
> > Is it some magic piece of syntax I've forgotten about?  Or something new
> > added to language while I wasn't paying attention (I still consider most
> > stuff added since 1.5 to be new-fangled :-)).
>
> +1 to forgotten about
> +1 to new-fangled=added since 1.5   When 3000 comes out I'll have to
> break down and buy a new Python book.  Also, it's amazing how much
> posting space is spent here replying to someone who is too lazy to key
> in a variable name.  Damn!

Lol.  It isn't that I'm too lazy; it's just that the character "_"
looks like "-" to me, and, in the math class I'm taking right now
(category theory), "-" is one of the notations to indicate "whatever"
-- a metasyntactic placeholder, if you will.  (For example, Hom (C, -)
is the covariant hom functor from C -> Sets.  If this makes no sense
to you, don't worry about it.)

After this discussion, it seems that if I'm to write Python for public
consumption, I should prefer

for dummy in xrange (n):
    do_stuff()

or one of the other suggestions instead. :-)