Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2016 09:11:42 -0700
From: Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org>
... It would be much cleaner if you could declare the
variable before the first `if`. But picking a good initializer is
tricky, especially if you have a type that does not include None.

PEP-484 suggests ellipsis for this.

~Elazar