That's how I expect it to behave. But anyway, the alternative (x in a new lexical environment each time the loop body is entered) only makes sense in a language where variables are scoped to a lexical block, not in Python where variables are scoped to the whole function.

I’ve seen a number of experienced python programmers bitten by this. They expect a new scope but don’t get one.

Yes - in many languages x is a new variable on each iteration of the loop. Python re-uses the same variable each time, because the loop does not have its own scope.