The 'print_and_assign_a' case comes up more often with a in an enclosing local scope, so you couldn't really get it to work prior to the introduction of 'nonloc

The 'print_and_assign_a' case comes up more often with a in an enclosing local scope, so you couldn't really get it to work prior to the introduction of 'nonlocal' in Python 3. The best you could do was something silly like a = [5] def print_and_assign_a(): print(a[0]) a[0]=2 It's cool that the second case works in other implementations. I hadn't thought to test that.