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.

Squares and rectangles are probably the best place to start when learning how to print Python star patterns. For squares, the number of stars on each row is equal to the number of rows. For rectangles ...

Previous PEPs to add pattern matching — PEP 275 and PEP 3103, proposed in 2001 and 2006 respectively — were turned down due to lack of popular support.PEP 3103 was drafted by Python creator ...