Some functional programming languages offer some clever approaches to the problem of working with statically typed function definitions. The problem is that many functions we'd like to write are entirely generic with respect to data type. For example, most of our statistical functions are identical for int or float numbers, as long as the division returns a value that is a subclass of numbers.Real (for example, Decimal, Fraction, or float). In many functional languages, sophisticated type or type-pattern matching rules are used by the compiler to make a single generic definition work for multiple data types. Python doesn't have this problem and doesn't need the pattern matching.
Instead of the (possibly) ...
