On 2011-12-15, at 21:51 , Antoine Pitrou wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:42:42 -0500 Ned Batchelder ned@nedbatchelder.com wrote:
This is another place where Python is inconsistent. We're told, "lists are for homogenous sequences of varying length, like a C array; tuples are for heterogenous aggregations of known length, like a C struct." Then we define a function foo(*args), and Python gives us a tuple! :-(
How is it inconsistent? Function signatures generally have a fixed (or mostly fixed) number of heterogenous arguments.
But *args is mostly dedicated to an arbitrary (non-fixed) number of homogenous arguments. In statically typed languages with varargs, they're generally represented as an array-type collection.
It's either that or a "rest of that crap" catchall used to forward arguments without caring much for what they are.