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.

I have a string of 1s and 0s that represents a binary number (e.g. '00101101'). How would I convert that to an actual num? If I use int(), Python assumes decimal and creates a number that's much, much ...