Is using range() in for loops really Pythonic?

Larry Bates larry.bates at websafe.com`
Tue May 13 09:25:40 EDT 2008


John Salerno wrote:
> I know it's popular and very handy, but I'm curious if there are purists
> out there who think that using something like:
> 
> for x in range(10):
>     #do something 10 times
> 
> is unPythonic. The reason I ask is because the structure of the for loop
> seems to be for iterating through a sequence. It seems somewhat
> artificial to use the for loop to do something a certain number of
> times, like above.
> 
> Anyone out there refuse to use it this way, or is it just impossible to
> avoid?

I use it quite often, especially if I want to implement a fixed number of 
retries on a communications channel.

-Larry



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