I think I've finally unlocked the usefulness of LLMs
A simple question on Boot.dev about design considerations for a language feature, turned into a fascinating conversation on software engineering in general. I post it here for posterity. Is function overloading with different data types available in python? Ah, a great question, curious coder! Python does not support traditional function overloading like some other languages such as C++ or Java. In those languages, you can define multiple functions with the same name, distinguished by their parameter types. However, Python functions are dynamically typed and defined only once. Instead, in Python, a single function can handle many different data types by using techniques like: Type checking inside the function : You can check the type of arguments using isinstance() or type() . Default arguments or variable-length arguments : Using *args or **kwargs , a function can accept a flexible number of positional and keyword arguments. For example:...