Issue 4199 begins with a self-explanatory comment: PEP 3104 says that the nonlocal and global statements should allow a shorthand. ("global x; x = 3" == "global x = 3") This patch implements that. Benjamin posted his patch on 2008-10-24. It got postponed to 3.2 because it was too late for 3.1, and then to 3.3 because 3.2 still fell under the language moratorium, and then was forgotten for 3.3. Georg Brandl and Jeremy Hylton raised some issues with the patch and with the PEP's specification: http://bugs.python.org/issue4199#msg100015 We've gone five years in 3.x without supporting this statement form. Is it still worth implementing it for 3.4? Or should the issue simply be closed (and maybe a note added to the PEP that "we didn't do this after all")? --amk