You realize that you're looking at a 399 line script, right? A couple of globals are perfectly reasonable at that scale. Also note that checking for "x is not

You realize that you're looking at a 399 line script, right? A couple of globals are perfectly reasonable at that scale. Also note that checking for "x is not None" is the recommended, idiomatic Python style (see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ for reference). More importantly, the script works, and was apparently used by quite a few people. Rewriting something that is already known to work, just because you don't like its style, is generally a bad idea.