The min Wakeup Call!

Time for something more realistic. To make this chapter’s concepts more concrete, let’s work through an exercise that demonstrates a practical application of argument-matching tools.

Suppose you want to code a function that is able to compute the minimum value from an arbitrary set of arguments and an arbitrary set of object data types. That is, the function should accept zero or more arguments, as many as you wish to pass. Moreover, the function should work for all kinds of Python object types: numbers, strings, lists, lists of dictionaries, files, and even None.

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The first requirement provides a natural example of how the * feature can be put to good use—we can collect arguments into a tuple and step over each of them in turn with a simple for loop. The second part of the problem definition is easy: because every object type supports comparisons, we don’t have to specialize the function per type (an application of polymorphism); we can simply compare objects blindly and let Python worry about what sort of comparison to perform.