temporary scope change

[Edward Elliott]

The only time I miss block delimiters in Python is when I want to 
temporarily change the scope of a block.  Suppose I have this code:

for x in list1:
     i += 1
     for y in list2:
         print x * i

Ignore the semantics for the moment (yes the code is suboptimal).  Say I 
need to disable the for y loop for a moment, but I want to keep the print 
statement.  I'd like to just do this

for x in list1:
     i += 1
#   for y in list2:
         print x * i

and have the print line execute as part of the for x block.  In other 
words, I want the block with print to be in the scope of the for x loop. 
But instead it raises a SyntaxError because the indentation is different.

Changing the indentation here isn't a big deal, but imagine the block 
inside y is very long.  Imagine you're disabling several blocks or multiple 
levels of nested blocks at one time.  It quickly becomes a thorny issue. 
Using a debugger to disable it at run-time doesn't always help either.

This seems a common enough problem that I suspect there's a python way to 
handle it.  I don't see a good way without resorting to block delimiters 
though, so I'm asking here for ideas.

Apologies if this has been covered before.  I did some searches of the 
python docs and newsgroup archives but couldn't find anything relevant 
(which may say more about my searching abilities than anything else).