I recently switched to using python 2.5 from 2.4, one of the new language level features in 2.5 is conditional expressions. Which I thought was odd because ...

One well-known benefit of using mapping types such as dictionaries is that the searching is very fast compared to a sequential lookup as in the above if - elif - else statements or using a for loop, ...

A proposal under consideration by Python’s development team would finally bring pattern matching statements to the language.