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.

As iOS and Mac become more friendly to amateur programmers, learning to code and build your own apps has never been more tempting. And you don’t need to set foot in an expensive school to do so.

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 ...