You should be able to do domething similar to the C example in most other languages with sane, lexical, variable scoping. Unfortunately, Python doesn't really play nice with nested scopes/functions so you are a bit out of luck here.

You could define local functions inside your larger sequential function, and then call immediately. Not 100% the same, but in terms of reading-code-in-order, it would have the effect, and it would create the same scope restrictions as the listed code.

You can't do it in Python, but it's not limited to C/C++ either; this is usually called "block scoping" and it's present in C/C++, C#, I think Ruby, Java, etc.