No ’switch’ in Python

After a first afternoon with Python, I noticed it misses the ’switch’ statement which I always thought was very useful. I’m not sure why it has been removed, however I’m sure there is some workaround for it. Hopefully I will go the whole mile this time and not ditch the language in between. I’ve always been wondering whether to Ruby or to Python and after reading many a blogs/articles on which one to start out with I’ve settled on Python.