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.

In the early days of C, you’d occasionally see someone — probably a former Pascal programmer — write something like this: #define BEGIN { #define END } This would usually initiate complaints about ...

whatever is a dummy variable that you can replace with other variables. Be sure to indent the statements to repeat in the loop. We need to have at least one condition to implement the loop and make ...

Interested in learning Python but don't know where to start? I'll walk you through the basics of the ever-popular programming language step-by-step. In an hour or so, you'll go from zero to writing ...