An alternative to method overloading

One prominent feature of many object-oriented programming languages is a tool called method overloading. Method overloading simply refers to having multiple methods with the same name that accept different sets of arguments. In statically typed languages, this is useful if we want to have a method that accepts either an integer or a string, for example. In non-object-oriented languages we might need two functions called add_s and add_i to accommodate such situations. In statically typed object-oriented languages, we'd need two methods, both called add, one that accepts strings, and one that accepts integers.

In Python, we only need one method, which accepts any type of object. It may have to do some testing on the object type (for example, if it is a string, convert it to an integer), but only one method is required.

However, method overloading is also useful when we want a method with the same name to accept different numbers or sets of arguments. For...