That is why I put the word "general"; C could be a dict, etc. I know that there are better ways for specific types, but the following code is a snippet that wor

That is why I put the word "general"; C could be a dict, etc. I know that there are better ways for specific types, but the following code is a snippet that works for fast prototyping and I have found it to be idiomatic in VB for collections (but I do very occasional VB, less than once a year). # pythonic pseudocode def exists(x, C): try: C[x] except: # could be more specific # IndexError, KeyError, etc... return False return True