polymorphism w/out signatures?

[Simon Brunning]

"Delaney, Timothy C (Timothy)" <tdelaney at avaya.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.329.1083877186.25742.python-list at python.org>...

> A better approach anyway IMO for the above is to either always require
> an iterable, or to accept a variable number of parameters i.e.
> 
> def nuke (lang, *langs):  # must have at least one parameter
>      nuke(lang1)
> 
>     for lang in langs
>          nuke(lang)
> 
> I could of course have constructed a combined tuple, but that's silly.
> 
> Then you can call the above as any of:
> 
> nuke('Perl')
> nuke('C++', 'Java', 'Perl')
> nuke(*('C++', 'Java', 'Perl'))

This is nice, Tim. But it only works if you don't need to pass in
other stuff, too. I've used an approach like this many times:

def setText(window, text, append=False):
    # Ensure that text is a list
    try:
        text + ''
        text = [text]
    except TypeError:
        pass

    ... rest of funtion, which can assume that 'text' is a list

I prefer not to use type() - it's enough that text is string-like or
list-like.

Cheers,
Simon B.