Hi Nick and Everyone, We had actually considered a similar idea (i.e. load sigils) during the design phase of pattern matching. In the interest of having a rule that is as simple as possible, we had proposed to use a leading dot as a universal marker. Tin's example would thus have been written as:: match r: case (src, None): ... case (.c, msg): ... case (.s, msg): ... However, this idea was met with some resistance. After briefly looking at various alternatives again, we eventually decided to defer this discussion entirely, allowing for the community to perhaps gain some experience with the basic pattern matching infrastructure and have a more in-depth discussion later on. Paul also wrote [1]:

Nice to hear that there're (high-hierarchy) people who want to do 2nd round on intent-explicitizing sigils, thanks.

While we from the PEP-622/634/635/636 team are quite adamant that stores should *not* be marked, having a second round of discussion about load sigils is quite exactly what we aimed for! However, we should consider this to be a discussion about an *extension* of the existing PEPs (634-636), rather than about modifying them: *The introduction of a load sigil (be it the dot or a question mark or anything else) can actually be discussed quite independently of the rest of pattern matching.* You might have noticed that the original PEP 622 contained a lot more than the current PEPs 634-636. This is intentional: with the current pattern matching PEPs, we boiled down the entire concept to the basic infrastructure that we need in order to get it going; a basic "starter kit" if you will. There are a lot of ideas around for extending this basic pattern matching and make it much more powerful and versatile, including load sigils as proposed by PEP 642. But let us perhaps just start with pattern matching---hopefully in 3.10 :)---and then gradually build on that. Otherwise, I am afraid we will just keep running in circles and never get it to lift off. Cheers, Tobias   [[1]] https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/QPYBAPOS...