Function overloading in Python: Missing

Asked 2009-04-09T07:57:01.207

64

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?

python overloading missing-features

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1 Answer

6

You can pass a mutable container datatype into a function, and it can contain anything you want.

If you need a different functionality, name the functions differently, or if you need the same interface, just write an interface function (or method) that calls the functions appropriately based on the data received.

It took a while to me to get adjusted to this coming from Java, but it really isn't a "big handicap".

answered 2009-04-09T08:53:55.233

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