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.

That is pretty self-explanatory except perhaps for "_", which is a wildcard that will match anything. The idea is that each case will be tried in the order specified, the first to match will be ...

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