Teaching the "range" function in Python 3

[Peter Otten]

Gregory Ewing wrote:

> Don't start with range(). Start with lists, and introduce the for
> loop as a way to iterate over lists. Leave range() until much later.
> You should be able to go a *long* way without it -- it's quite
> rare to need to iterate over a range of ints in idiomatic Python
> code.

Indeed. Among beginners the

for i in range(len(items)):
    print(items[i])

idiom is already too common.