what does 'for _ in range()' mean?

[Dave Benjamin]

In article <-IednYvL85_frJTc4p2dnA at powergate.ca>, Peter Hansen wrote:
> Matteo Dell'Amico wrote:
> 
>> Peter Hansen wrote:
>> 
>>> Actually, not in the least, but I'm happy to go on faith that
>>> you have a point and hope you have managed to communicate it
>>> to others. :-|
>> 
>> Let's try it again: in functional programming languages, you can use 
>> pattern-matching, so that you can define functions in a declarative 
>> fashion this way:
> 
> Oh!  Enlightment dawns.... we were still talking about Ocaml then.
> I see.

Actually, this example more resembles Haskell than OCaml. In OCaml, you'd
typically write something more like this:

let f x =
  match x with
    | 1 -> 2
    | 2 -> 3
    | 3 -> 4
    | _ -> 42

Or, as a shorthand

let f = function
  | 1 -> 2
  | 2 -> 3
  | 3 -> 4
  | _ -> 42
  
But the idea is the same, anyhow. "_" is special, and means something like
the "don't care" of digital logic.

In Python, you could also write this function with a dictionary:

def f(x):
    return {
        1: 2,
        2: 3,
        3: 4,
    }.get(x, 42)

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  .:[ dave benjamin: ramen/[sp00] -:- spoomusic.com -:- ramenfest.com ]:.

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