Does anyone else use this little idiom?

[miller.paul.w at gmail.com]

Ruby has a neat little convenience when writing loops where you don't
care about the loop index: you just do n.times do { ... some
code ... } where n is an integer representing how many times you want
to execute "some code."

In Python, the direct translation of this is a for loop.  When the
index doesn't matter to me, I tend to write it as:

for _ in xrange (1,n):
   some code

An alternative way of indicating that you don't care about the loop
index would be

for dummy in xrange (1,n):
   some code

But I like using _ because it's only 1 character and communicates well
the idea "I don't care about this variable."

The only potential disadvantages I can see are threefold:

1. It might be a little jarring to people not used to it.  I do admit
it looks pretty strange at first.

2. The variable _ has special meaning at the interactive interpreter
prompt.  There may be some confusion because of this.

5.  Five is right out.  (ob Holy Grail reference, of course. :-)

So, I guess I'm wondering if anyone else uses a similar idiom and if
there are any downsides to it that I'm not aware of.

Thanks

Paul