You could dig even deeper. The reason for these differences in how the for loop works happen because Python comes from the procedural tradition, while Ruby come

You could dig even deeper. The reason for these differences in how the for loop works happen because Python comes from the procedural tradition, while Ruby comes from the Smalltalk tradition. In other Smalltalk-inspired languages (but not Ruby), you can do the same thing with an even simpler language feature: if-statements. In procedural languages, including object-procedural languages such as Java and Python, an if-statement is a core language feature with its own syntax. In Smalltalk, conditions are kicked out of the core language and into the standard library. You have methods on the True and False objects that either take an anonymous function and execute it or perform a noop, or take two anonymous functions and decide which one to execute.