Why will "loop" be printed 3 times and not 6 times?

Question

This was one question in python challenge:
"How many times will the string "loop" be printed?"

a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
n = 0
for _ in a
del(a[n])
n += 1
print("loop")

I didn't know what the "_" operator does, so I tried to google it and I found this article: https://hackernoon.com/understanding-the-underscore-of-python-309d1a029edc

Apparently, the underscore is used to ignore the index but how does that change the number of iterations through the loop?

Answer 1

"_" is "strange" name of variable, it could be any letter, or word here.
then - normally this for loop would run 6 times, but each time you iterate through it you delete 1 value from a[], so after 3 passes, you have 3 values left and for loop run 3 times already, so program ends.