Hey everyone, I meant to say, I agree with the two of you, actually. `_` as a variable name is terrible, but it /can/ be used all the same ; on the other hand, wildcards should not be legitimate variable names, to prevent misunderstandings / accidents / bugs. Had I taken part in the discussion aroud pattern matching, I would have liked the `else` syntax better : having a special syntax for special cases seems clearer, cleaner, and safer. Another option that comes to mind is using `*` as the wildcard. There is already a precedent for using `*` alone, e.g. in `import` statements. In this case, it means "import everything from this module", as opposed to listing the items you need. I can easily see the parallel with `match` statements, thus making it intuitive to learn and use this new syntax. Anyway, yes, `_` as joker has flaws, the biggest one being to be a resolvable variable name ; what is the expected behaviour when running a script that has (even accidentally) a viariable named `_` ? The question is even more pressing in REPL, since there /is/ necessarily such a variable ! I guess it's too late to change anything, though, so we'll have to get used to it...

From https://docs.python.org/3.10/whatsnew/3.10.html <https://docs.python.org/3.10/whatsnew/3.10.html>: def http_error(status): match status: case 400: return "Bad request" case 404: return "Not found" case 418: return "I'm a teapot" case _: return "Something's wrong with the Internet" The wildcard idea looks just wrong and confusing. What if I want to use it as a variable and match against it like _ = 504? This is how it should be done: def http_error(status): _ = 504 match status: case 400: return "Bad request" case 404: return "Not found" case 418: return "I'm a teapot" case _: return "Gateway Timeout" else: return "Something's wrong with the Internet"

Don't do that.

There is a very strong convention in Python that a single underscore is to be used for two purposes (and a third in the interactive interpreter only):

(1) For "don't care" variables; anything that you don't care about and aren't intending to use should be named `_`.

first, *_, last = sequence

This tells me that I am only using the first and last items, everything else is ignored.

(2) For internationalisation. This is a convention that comes from other languages, but it is so widespread that we're kinda stuck with it.

print(_("Try again."))

By convention, the underscore function is used to translate messages into the current location's language.

(3) And in the interactive interpreter, underscore is a special variable which captures the previous result. This doesn't work in scripts.

>>> 5 + 4 9 >>> _*10 90