In the last post introducing Python, I demonstrated how to make a simple app using variables and conditional statements. In order to do anything really powerful in a given programming language though, ...

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.

There should only be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it”, says the Zen of Python. Yet there are areas where even seasoned programmers debate what the right or wrong way to do things ...