[Python-Dev] PEP 276 (simple iterator for ints) (original) (raw)

Andrew Koenig ark at acm.org
Sun Jul 4 17:13:01 CEST 2004

IMO it would be clearer, and equally elegant, to write this as something like

for i in indices(myList): ... which is easily accomplished with the aid of a suitable definition for indices(). No language changes needed.

I think that

for i in myList.keys():

would be even better, because it allow the same usage for dict and list. Of course that wouldn't generalize to other sequences that support len.

Incidentally, I've always liked Algol 68's loop syntax, which if I remember right is something like this:

[ for <id> ] [ from <expr> ] [ to <expr> ] [ by <expr> ]
     [ while <expr> ]  do <suite> od

So one would write

for i to n do ... od

or even

for i from 0 while <whatever> do ... od

which would loop while is true and keep count of the iterations.

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