since we're going to see more realistic example of this later in this in "emulating the python print function, 'll postpone the rest of this story until then for an additional example of keyword-only arguments in actionsee the iteration options timing case study in and for additional function definition enhancements in python xstay tuned for the discussion of function annotation syntax in the min wakeup callok--it' time for something more realistic to make this concepts more concretelet' work through an exercise that demonstrates practical application of argument-matching tools suppose you want to code function that is able to compute the minimum value from an arbitrary set of arguments and an arbitrary set of object data types that isthe function should accept zero or more argumentsas many as you wish to pass moreoverthe function should work for all kinds of python object typesnumbersstringslistslists of dictionariesfilesand even none the first requirement provides natural example of how the feature can be put to good use--we can collect arguments into tuple and step over each of them in turn with simple for loop the second part of the problem definition is easybecause every object type supports comparisonswe don' 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 according to the objects being compared full credit the following file shows three ways to code this operationat least one of which was suggested by student in one of my courses (this example is often group exercise to circumvent dozing after lunch)the first function fetches the first argument (args is tupleand traverses the rest by slicing off the first (there' no point in comparing an object to itselfespecially if it might be large structurethe second version lets python pick off the first and rest of the arguments automaticallyand so avoids an index and slice the third converts from tuple to list with the built-in list call and employs the list sort method arguments