> The essence of the issue you quote is that Python needs block-level scope for variables In this case, would it not better to fix block scoping first, and int

> The essence of the issue you quote is that Python needs block-level scope for variables In this case, would it not better to fix block scoping first, and introduce the pattern matching feature later? Also, this is by far not a easily agreeable issue because changing this will break a lot of ugly but working imperative code. This has easily more impact than changing the default string type to Unicode. For me, adding pattern matching before defining scoping feels like a technical debt issue in a large code base - if you make a change that depends on an improvement, it is much cleaner to make that improvement first. Also, Python has only one widely-used implementation, and arguably it will be difficult to change behavior of that implementation if people did came to rely on a certain scoping behavior.