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What you are saying is "it works that way because it is the
way it works". I see no reason at all for this odd behaviour
other than bug-compatibility. I find nothing at all in the
documentation supporting this behaviour either; please
inform me if  I have missed something.

All other languages supporting eval and lexical scoping
(Lisp, Scheme, Perl, Ruby, etc) work in the expected way. I
have no problems if Python wants to be different for
whatever reason, but it should be documented.

I did a quick Google in comp.lang.python but could not find
anything that supported this "exception" or gave a rational
explanation. Kindly direct me to any resource you know of
that could help enlighten me on this issue.

>#  From your comments, I suspect you expect 0.

Of course not. I know very well how lexical scoping works,
so please don't put words in my mouth.

None of your examples have anything to do with scoping. As
we both know, it is not the _values_ of the variables that
is important for variable binding, it is their identity;
which variable is chosen, not what they happen to contain at
the time the lambda expression is evaluated.