Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

I have a string ... Python assumes decimal and creates a number that's much, much bigger (in the above example, it would return the # 101101 instead of 45). I tried the binascii.a2b_uu(string ...

What new programming language features would you like to see added to Python ... a to_string() function could have different implementations for converting from integers, floating-point numbers ...

Padding the output of the inner loop flips it horizontally. Squares and rectangles are probably the best place to start when learning how to print Python star patterns. For squares, the number of ...