For Counter Variable

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 07:53:55 +0200, Thomas Rachel wrote:

> When learning Python, it often happend me to re-inven the wheel. But as
> soon as I saw the presence of something I re-wrote, I skipped my
> re-written version and used the built-in.

And me.

Not just Python either. The very first piece of code I wrote on a Linux 
machine was a shell script that (very badly, and even more very slowly) 
counted the number of files in a directory. 20 lines (if I remember 
correctly) to duplicate a simple:

ls | wc -l


It was a humbling lesson to always check what features a programming 
environment or language offers before reinventing the wheel with four 
sides.



-- 
Steven