I’d like to display the text “Catgories: “, followed by a comma separated list of all categories assigned to an individual entry.  If there are no categories, I don’t want to display “Catgories: “.

As discussed here with a php workaround to hold anyone over:
http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/61424/

I posted the same thing this past week. Second. If it’s the standard operation for looping variable pairs, then even if {count} isn’t available, a {category_counter} or something would be nice.

I just came across the thread now.

But shouldn’t it be possible to do the following:

I didn’t test the code and it may be that you run into trouble since assign_variable is on e of the first things parsed. But it most certainly does run (tested) if you call this as an embed:

and in the embeded template

}

I too would like to request a count variable for category variable pair. It’s surprising that this isn’t included out of the box already. I can’t imagine too many situations where you’d want to display the current post’s categories without some kind of context to explain what you’re showing.