Function overloading in Python: Missing

Question

As function overloading says:

Function overloading is absent in Python.

As far as I feel this a big handicap since its also an object-oriented (OO) language. Initially I found that unable to differentiate between the argument types was difficult, but the dynamic nature of Python made it easy (e.g. list, tuples, strings are much similar).

However, counting the number of arguments passed and then doing the job is like an overkill.

Any pythonic way to do this?

Answer 1

As unwind noted, keyword arguments with default values can go a long way.

I'll also state that in my opinion, it goes against the spirit of Python to worry a lot about what types are passed into methods. In Python, I think it's more accepted to use duck typing -- asking what an object can do, rather than what it is.

Thus, if your method may accept a string or a tuple, you might do something like this:

def print_names(names):
    """Takes a space-delimited string or an iterable"""
    try:
        for name in names.split(): # string case
            print name
    except AttributeError:
        for name in names:
            print name

Then you could do either of these:

print_names("Ryan Billy")
print_names(("Ryan", "Billy"))

Although an API like that sometimes indicates a design problem.