shortcuts there are many aspects of python that appear more reminiscent of structural or functional programming than object-oriented programming although object-oriented programming has been the most visible paradigm of the past two decadesthe old models have seen recent resurgence as with python' data structuresmost of these tools are syntactic sugar over an underlying object-oriented implementationwe can think of them as further abstraction layer built on top of the (already abstractedobject-oriented paradigm in this we'll be covering grab bag of python features that are not strictly object-orientedbuilt-in functions that take care of common tasks in one call file / and context managers an alternative to method overloading functions as objects python built-in functions there are numerous functions in python that perform task or calculate result on certain types of objects without being methods on the underlying class they usually abstract common calculations that apply to multiple types of classes this is duck typing at its bestthese functions accept objects that have certain attributes or methodsand are able to perform generic operations using those methods manybut not allof these are special double underscore methods we've used many of the built-in functions alreadybut let' quickly go through the important ones and pick up few neat tricks along the way