No worries, this was debated fiercely. In the end, we had to choose between "Python has a reference syntax for pattern matching" vs "Python continues to have disparate 3rd-party extensions for pattern matching, without clear leader".
The essence of the issue you quote is that Python needs block-level scope for variables (in addition to the standard function-level scope). Similar to what JavaScript acquired with "let" and "const" keywords. That's more pervasive issue than just "match" statement of pattern matching, and thus better handled orthogonally to it.
> The essence of the issue you quote is that Python needs block-level scope for variables (in addition to the standard function-level scope).
No, it's not. I mean, sure, either general or special-case (like comprehensions already provide, and there is no good reason for matches not to) isolated scope would solve this, but so would bind-on-success-only with existing scoping.
> The essence of the issue you quote is that Python needs block-level scope for variables
In this case, would it not better to fix block scoping first, and introduce the pattern matching feature later?
Also, this is by far not a easily agreeable issue because changing this will break a lot of ugly but working imperative code. This has easily more impact than changing the default string type to Unicode.
For me, adding pattern matching before defining scoping feels like a technical debt issue in a large code base - if you make a change that depends on an improvement, it is much cleaner to make that improvement first.
Also, Python has only one widely-used implementation, and arguably it will be difficult to change behavior of that implementation if people did came to rely on a certain scoping behavior.
The essence of the issue you quote is that Python needs block-level scope for variables (in addition to the standard function-level scope). Similar to what JavaScript acquired with "let" and "const" keywords. That's more pervasive issue than just "match" statement of pattern matching, and thus better handled orthogonally to it.