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 ... a common feature of many programming languages, such as switch/case in C. It allows one of a number of possible actions ...

It's a fun and effective way to teach and reinforce programming fundamentals ... are probably the best place to start when learning how to print Python star patterns. For squares, the number of stars ...