Yes, I meant the rules are bad. I called them heuristics, because I assume they came up with the rules as a heuristic to what would be the most useful behaviour.
Python didn't use to have lexical scoping, so the rules are retrofitting around that.
Yeah, it all seems a bit hacky. Especially the bit where a caught exception bound to a variable is cleared at the end of the `except` clause. I'm pretty sure it's because if you didn't you'd get a reference cycle (exception object -> stack trace -> function invocation record -> function locals -> exception object), which makes CPython's GC sad.
