Generic functions

Generic functions are one of my favorite features of the standard library. Python is a very dynamic language and through duck-typing, you will frequently be able to write code that works in many different conditions (it doesn't matter if you receive a list or a tuple), but in some cases, you will really need to have two totally different code bases depending on the received input.

For example, we might want to have a function that prints content of the provided dictionary in a human-readable format, but we want it also to work properly on lists of tuples and report errors for unsupported types.

How to do it...

The functools.singledispatch decorator allows us to implement a generic dispatch based on argument type:

from functools import singledispatch

@singledispatch
def human_readable(d):
    raise ValueError('Unsupported argument type %s' % type(d))

@human_readable.register(dict)
def human_readable_dict(d):
    for key, value in d.items():
        print('{}: {}'.format(key...