count[ + return count[ return counter counter make_counter(you might be wondering why this is useful in practiceyou can write very general functions with lots of optionsthen fabricate simplermore specialized functions here' an example of creating string formatting functiondef format_and_pad(templatespace)def formatter( )return (template xrjust(spacereturn formatter you could then create floating point formatter that always returns length- string like soin [ ]fmt format_and_pad(' ' in [ ]fmt( out[ ] if you learn more about object-oriented programming in pythonyou might observe that these patterns also could be implemented (albeit more verboselyusing classes extended call syntax with *args**kwargs the way that function arguments work under the hood in python is actually very simple when you write func(abcd=somee=value)the positional and keyword arguments are actually packed up into tuple and dictrespectively so the internal function receives tuple args and dict kwargs and internally does the equivalent ofabc args kwargs get(' 'd_default_valuee kwargs get(' 'e_default_valuethis all happens nicely behind the scenes of courseit also does some error checking and allows you to specify some of the positional arguments as keywords also (even if they aren' keyword in the function declaration!def say_hello_then_call_f( *args**kwargs)print 'args is'args print 'kwargs is'kwargs print("hellonow ' going to call %sfreturn (*args**kwargsdef (xyz= )return ( yz then if we call with say_hello_then_call_f we get appendixpython language essentials www it-ebooks info