The creators of the Python language are mulling a new proposal, PEP 622, that would finally bring a pattern matching statement syntax to Python.

Coconut, a newly developed open source dialect of Python, provides new syntax for using features found in functional languages like Haskell and Scala.

As an FYI, nosferatu-man's and my solutions are better than S. Carton's, but require Python 2.4. The "key" parameter to sort/sorted does a "Decorate-Sort-Undecorate"[1] automatically, whereas the ...