Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

The new pattern matching statements would give Python programmers ... has lacked a native syntax for pattern matching, it has been possible to emulate it with if/elif/else chains or a dictionary ...

I recently switched to using python 2.5 from 2.4, one of the new language level features in 2.5 is conditional expressions. Which I thought was odd because I was already writing conditional ...