> There's one very simple way we could do this in Py3k
> without requiring any new syntax or keywords: just
> redefine the meaning of "global" to mean "not local".

I would probably be a solid -0 on such a proposal; I still don't think
it's really necessary, but I've never used (or really seen) global more
than one level deep, so would guess its impact would be low.

Having the "global" keyword semantics changed to be "lexically global"

would break in the cases that "global" is used on a name within a
nested scope that has an enclosing scope with the same name.  I would
suppose that actual instances in real code of this would be rare.


Consider:
>>> x = 1
>>> def f() :
...   x = 2
...   def inner() :
...     global x
...     print x
...   inner()
...
>>> f()
1

Under the proposed rules:

>>> f()
2

PEP 227 also had backwards incompatibilities that were similar and I
suggest handling them the same way by issuing a warning in these cases
when the new semantics are not being used (
i.e. no "from __future__").