by defaultmax operates based upon the natural order of elements according to the operator for that type but the maximum can be computed by comparing some other aspect of the elements this is done by providing an auxiliary function that converts natural element to some other value for the sake of comparison for exampleif we are interested in finding numeric value with magnitude that is maximal ( considering - to be larger than + )we can use the calling syntax max(abkey=absin this casethe built-in abs function is itself sent as the value associated with the keyword parameter key (functions are first-class objects in pythonsee section when max is called in this wayit will compare abs(ato abs( )rather than to the motivation for the keyword syntax as an alternate to positional arguments is important in the case of max this function is polymorphic in the number of argumentsallowing call such as max( , , , )thereforeit is not possible to designate key function as traditional positional element sorting functions in python also support similar key parameter for indicating nonstandard order (we explore this further in section and in section when discussing sorting algorithmspython' built-in functions table provides an overview of common functions that are automatically available in pythonincluding the previously discussed absmaxand range when choosing names for the parameterswe use identifiers xyz for arbitrary numeric typesk for an integerand aband for arbitrary comparable types we use the identifieriterableto represent an instance of any iterable type ( strlisttuplesetdict)we will discuss iterators and iterable data types in section sequence represents more narrow category of indexable classesincluding strlistand tuplebut neither set nor dict most of the entries in table can be categorized according to their functionality as followsinput/outputprintinputand open will be more fully explained in section character encodingord and chr relate characters and their integer code points for exampleorda is and chr( is mathematicsabsdivmodpowroundand sum provide common mathematical functionalityan additional math module will be introduced in section orderingmax and min apply to any data type that supports notion of comparisonor to any collection of such values likewisesorted can be used to produce an ordered list of elements drawn from any existing collection collections/iterationsrange generates new sequence of numberslen reports the length of any existing collectionfunctions reversedallanyand map operate on arbitrary iterations as welliter and next provide general framework for iteration through elements of collectionand are discussed in section