Comment by int_19h

The statement can mean whatever the language designers decide it should mean, and one plausible meaning is to introduce a new scope for the body of the loop. It's not even something unique in Python, given that sequence comprehensions do just that; e.g. this prints 0,1,...,9:

   for f in (lambda: print(i) for i in range(0, 10)): f()

Unfortunately, Python is simply inconsistent in this regard. For example, list comprehensions leak the variable for back-compat reasons, so if you substitute (lambda: ...) with [lambda: ...] above, you'll get a bunch of 9s.

But, backwards compatibility aside, the language could change to make for-loops behave like sequence comprehensions wrt scoping.