[radiowave]

That's an interesting point, that the behaviour of an inherited class variable is consistent with a case you show where inheritance plays no part at all.

So from that point of view, it comes down to whether we expect that an inherited class variable really is just some variable in an outer scope that we can shadow with a local variable of the same name (per your example), or whether we expect that inheritance provides some stronger notion of ownership of the inherited variable.

I dislike the former case, largely because I dislike the idea that the location at which a variable is stored can appear to change merely by assigning to it. But then, I dislike Python's implicit declaration of local variables for exactly the same reason. So you're right, there IS some consistency there. ;-)