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

A slightly faster approach than looping on xrange(N) is:

import itertools

for _ in itertools.repeat(None, N):
    do_something()

I just use for _ in range(n), it's straight to the point. It's going to generate the entire list for huge numbers in Python 2, but if you're using Python 3 it's not a problem.

Use the _ variable, like so:

# A long way to do integer exponentiation
num = 2
power = 3
product = 1
for _ in range(power):
    product *= num
print(product)

since function is first-class citizen, you can write small wrapper (from Alex answers)

def repeat(f, N):
    for _ in itertools.repeat(None, N): f()

then you can pass function as argument.