There is a special way of receiving parameters to a function as a tuple or a dictionary using the * or ** prefix respectively. This is useful when taking variable number of arguments in the function.

		
>>> def powersum(power, *args):
...     '''Return the sum of each argument raised to specified power.'''
...     total = 0
...     for i in args:
...             total += pow(i, power)
...     return total
...
>>> powersum(2, 3, 4)
25

>>> powersum(2, 10)
100
		
		

Due to the * prefix on the args variable, all extra arguments passed to the function are stored in args as a tuple. If a ** prefix had been used instead, the extra parameters would be considered to be key/value pairs of a dictionary.