However, as long as we're talking about this stuff, I wish I could write "global foo" at module scope and have that mean "this variable is to be treated as global in all functions in this module".
This is similar to Greg Ewing's proposable to have 'rebindable x' at an outer function scope. My problem with it remains: It gives outer scopes (some) control over inner scopes. One of the guidelines is that a name defined in an inner scope should always shadow the same name in an outer scope, to allow evolution of the outer scope without affecting local details of inner scope. (IOW if an inner function defines a local variable 'x', the outer scope shouldn't be able to change that.) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)