object as a reserved keyword

[John J. Lee]

danb_83 at yahoo.com (Dan Bishop) writes:
[...]
> When I write in other languages and need a meaningless variable name,
> I tend to use an abbreviation for the variable's type.
> 
>    public void foo(String str) {/* ... */}
>    public void foo(List list) {/* ... */}
> 
> As you can see, this convention doesn't carry over very well to
> Python.

Which is frequently a good thing, I think.  Most of the time one does
this, it's (bad) laziness.  Better to think of a name that describes
more than the type.

People do often use names ending in 's' for iterators (including
sequences), which is useful for ease of reading:

foos = [Foo(1), Foo(2), Foo(3)]
for foo in foos:
    print foo

(breaking the rule about naming things after their type there, of
course! -- but I have the excuse that there's no meaning *there* to
use when picking names in that made-up example)

Also, I often use the name 'text' where you write 'str' above.


John