SV: Conventions for dummy name

[David.Reksten at sweco.no]

Torsten Bronger wrote:
>Hallöchen!
>
>Ben Finney writes:
>
>> "Diez B. Roggisch" <deets at nospam.web.de> writes:
>>
>>> The underscore is used as "discarded" identifier. So maybe
>>> 
>>> for _ in xrange(10):
>>>     ...
>>
>> The problem with the '_' name is that it is already well-known and
>> long-used existing convention for an entirely unrelated purpose:
>> in the 'gettext' i18n library, the '_' function to get the
>> locally-translated version of a text string.
>
>Right, that's because I've used "__" where not all returning values
>are interesing to me such as
>
>a, b, __ = function_that_returns_three_values(x, y)

Variable name "dummy" serves the same purpose, such as:

    a, b, dummy = function_that_returns_three_values(x, y)

According to http://linux.die.net/man/1/pylint it is also possible to use the
option

    --dummy-variables-rgx=<regexp>

to further specify which variable not to report as unused. As far as I can
tell, it defaults to '_|dummy'.

.david