What is the rationale behind the advocated use of the for i in xrange(...)-style looping constructs in Python? For simple integer looping, the difference in overheads is substantial. I conducted a simple test using two pieces of code:

File idiomatic.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

M = 10000
N = 10000

if __name__ == "__main__":
    x, y = 0, 0
    for x in xrange(N):
        for y in xrange(M):
            pass

File cstyle.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

M = 10000
N = 10000

if __name__ == "__main__":
    x, y = 0, 0
    while x < N:
        while y < M:
            y += 1
        x += 1

Profiling results were as follows:

bash-3.1$ time python cstyle.py

real    0m0.109s
user    0m0.015s
sys     0m0.000s

bash-3.1$ time python idiomatic.py

real    0m4.492s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.031s

I can understand why the Pythonic version is slower -- I imagine it has a lot to do with calling xrange N times, perhaps this could be eliminated if there was a way to rewind a generator. However, with this deal of difference in execution time, why would one prefer to use the Pythonic version?