argument type

[Roy Smith]

"It's me" <itsme at yahoo.com> wrote:
> How can I tell from within a function whether a particular argument is a
> sigular type, or a complex type?
> ...
> In C++, you would do it with function overloading.  If arg1 is always simple
> type, I wouldn't care what it is.  But what if I *do* need to know whether
> arg1 is a list or not?

I have a vague feeling you're trying to write C++ in Python, and that 
usually doesn't work well.  In general, C++ (and Java) is all about 
types of things, while Python is more about capabilities of things.

What do you mean by a "simple type" as opposed to a "complex type"?  I 
suspect by "complex type" you really mean "tuple or list".  If that's 
the case, you can certainly do something like:

def myFunc (arg):
   if isinstance (arg, tuple) or isinstance (arg, list):
      blah, blah, blah

But before you do that, you might want to think if this is really what 
you want to do.  What, exactly, is it that you're trying to do that 
requires you to know what type of object an argument is?