I haven't gotten to writing that into the PEP yet, but I think the rule has to be to take the scope of evaluation not the scope of definition. I know it needs to be there,  and I'm just thinking about helpful examples. 

Which is to say the semantics are more like `eval()` than like a lambda closure.

... and I know this is going to raise the neck hairs of many folks,  because effectively I'm proposing a kind of dynamic scoping. Possibly in my defense,  I think Carl's PEP 690 can do the same thing. :-)