Variable-length argument tuples

Available under Creative Commons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Functions can take a variable number of arguments. A parameter name that begins with * gathers arguments into a tuple. For example, printall takes any number of arguments and prints them:

def printall(*args):print args

The gather parameter can have any name you like, but args is conventional. Here’s how the function works:

>>> printall(1, 2.0, '3')(1, 2.0, '3')

The complement of gather is scatter. If you have a sequence of values and you want to pass it to a function as multiple arguments, you can use the * operator. For example, divmod takes exactly two arguments; it doesn’t work with a tuple:

>>> t = (7, 3)>>> divmod(t)TypeError: divmod expected 2 arguments, got 1

But if you scatter the tuple, it works:

>>> divmod(*t)(2, 1)

Exercise 12.1.Many of the built-in functions use variable-length argument tuples. For example,max and min can take any number of arguments:

>>> max(1,2,3)3

Butsumdoes not.

>>> sum(1,2,3)TypeError: sum expected at most 2 arguments, got 3

Write a function calledsumallthat takes any number of arguments and returns their sum.