Yes, I did read some hostility in it. But I wasn't sure. I went back and reviewed your posts in the Perl thread and decided you seemed pretty even-handed.
You are correct about 2.1/2.2. I was correctly remembering what I had read in the Wikipedia article on Python:
"The release included a change to the language specification to support nested scopes, like other statically scoped languages.[13] (The feature was turned off by default, and not required, until Python 2.2.)"
But a review of the original "What's new in Python 2.0" and "What's new in Python 2.1" documents shows that to be inaccurate.