Does anyone else use this little idiom?

[Stef Mientki]

be careful, "_"  is thé translation function used in Il8N, Il10N 
localization / internationalization
e.g.
 print  _( "hello" )

cheers,
Stef

miller.paul.w at gmail.com wrote:
> 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
>