Tip 18 Pass It
Pythonic Programming — by Dmitry Zinoviev (27 / 116)
👈 Avoid range() in Loops | TOC | Try It 👉
★2.7, 3.4+ Some compound statements in Python (for example, class, for, while, if, and try) require that their body is not empty and contains at least one statement. Even if you do not want to provide that statement, you must. In C/C++/Java, one would use an empty statement — a block of two curly braces {}. Python does not use curly braces (at least not for this purpose). Instead, it uses indentation, and there is a problem with an empty statement defined through indentation — it is invisible, like this:
class EmptyClass:
# Is there an empty statement here? Can you see it?Python provides an equivalent of an empty statement called pass. You use pass when you must use a statement, but you do not care about it:
class EmptyClass:
passYou could use a string literal instead, something like “Do nothing here” — but that goes against The Zen of Python: “There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it.”
👈 Avoid range() in Loops | TOC | Try It 👉
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