Summary
We covered a grab bag of topics in this chapter. Each represented an important non-object-oriented feature that is popular in Python. Just because we can use object-oriented principles does not always mean we should!
However, we also saw that Python typically implements such features by providing a syntax shortcut to traditional object-oriented syntax. Knowing the object-oriented principles underlying these tools allows us to use them more effectively in our own classes.
We discussed a series of built-in functions and file I/O operations. There are a whole bunch of different syntaxes available to us when calling functions with arguments, keyword arguments, and variable argument lists. Context managers are useful for the common pattern of sandwiching a piece of code between two method calls. Even functions are objects, and, conversely, any normal object can be made callable.
In the next chapter, we'll learn more about string and file manipulation, and even spend some time with one of...
