Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

Generic functions

Generic functions are one of my favorite features of the standard library. Python is a very dynamic language and through duck-typing, you will frequently be able to write code that works in many different conditions (it doesn't matter if you receive a list or a tuple), but in some cases, you will really need to have two totally different code bases depending on the received input.

For example, we might want to have a function that prints content of the provided dictionary in a human-readable format, but we want it also to work properly on lists of tuples and report errors for unsupported types.