pythonic way to do something N times without an index variable?

Question

Every day I love python more and more.

Today, I was writing some code like:

for i in xrange(N):
    do_something()

I had to do som

Answer 1

I found the various answers really elegant (especially Alex Martelli's) but I wanted to quantify performance first hand, so I cooked up the following script:

from itertools import repeat
N = 10000000

def payload(a):
    pass

def standard(N):
    for x in range(N):
        payload(None)

def underscore(N):
    for _ in range(N):
        payload(None)

def loopiter(N):
    for _ in repeat(None, N):
        payload(None)

def loopiter2(N):
    for _ in map(payload, repeat(None, N)):
        pass

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import timeit
    print("standard: ",timeit.timeit("standard({})".format(N),
        setup="from __main__ import standard", number=1))
    print("underscore: ",timeit.timeit("underscore({})".format(N),
        setup="from __main__ import underscore", number=1))
    print("loopiter: ",timeit.timeit("loopiter({})".format(N),
        setup="from __main__ import loopiter", number=1))
    print("loopiter2: ",timeit.timeit("loopiter2({})".format(N),
        setup="from __main__ import loopiter2", number=1))

I also came up with an alternative solution that builds on Martelli's one and uses map() to call the payload function. OK, I cheated a bit in that I took the freedom of making the payload accept a parameter that gets discarded: I don't know if there is a way around this. Nevertheless, here are the results:

standard:  0.8398549720004667
underscore:  0.8413165839992871
loopiter:  0.7110594899968419
loopiter2:  0.5891903560004721

so using map yields an improvement of approximately 30% over the standard for loop and an extra 19% over Martelli's.