> Python's weird ideas of scope

I don't know that I'd call them weird, just the natural result of Python's assignment syntax (tho I suspect that you might call that weird as well). Without specific declaration syntax, it would be somewhere between messy and impossible to differentiate between block and function-level scopes. The only thing I could think of would be the inclusion of a new declaration/assignment operator, like `=:`, that would declare the variable as block scoped, but such a change would be backwards incompatible and I don't believe they're going to do that again.

What would you like it to look like? How would you want it to work?

Many choices for a new operator would not cause backwards incompatibility, as it'd currently be invalid syntax.

However, allowing block scope variables would make the interpreter internals far more complex for dubious benefit.

There's nothing weird about closure-based scoping. You find this in Python, R, Javascript, ... It has roots in the lambda calculus.