How does the Python's range function work?

If I write

for i in range(5):
      print i

Then it gives 0, 1, 2, 3, 4
Does that mean Python assigned 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 to i at the same time?
However if I wrote:

for i in range(5):
      a=i+1

Then I call a, it only gives 5
But if I add ''print a'' it gives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
So my question is what is the difference here?
Is i a string or a list or something else?

Or maybe can anyone help me to sort out:

for l in range(5):
    #vs,fs,rs are all m*n matrixs,got initial values in,i.e vs[0],fs[0],rs[0] are known
    #want use this foor loop to update them
    vs[l+1]=vs[l]+fs[l]
    fs[l+1]=((rs[l]-re[l])
    rs[l+1]=rs[l]+vs[l]
#then this code gives vs,fs,rs

If I run this kind of code, then I will get the answer only when l=5
How can I make them start looping?

i.e l=0 got values for vs[1],fs[1],rs[1],
then l=1 got values for vs[2],rs[2],fs[2]......and so on.
But python gives different arrays of fs,vs,rs, correspond to different value of l

How can I make them one piece?