Overcoming herpetophobia (or what's up w/ Python scopes)?

[Steve M]

This link seems to be about Closures in Python, but I am not feeling
sharp enough at the moment to evaluate the correctness of the
discussion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_programming_language#Closures

As others have said, you might get more useful responses if you can
elaborate upon what exactly you worry are shortcomings of Python
compared to Perl.