What are arches and quarks? How to use them in Python?

Arguments (*args) and keyword arguments (**kwargs) are special syntactic constructs in Python for passing a variable number of positional and named arguments to a function.

• *args allows passing an unlimited number of positional arguments as a tuple.
• **kwargs allows passing an unlimited number of named arguments as a dictionary.

Usage:

def my_function(*args, **kwargs):
    # args - tuple of positional arguments
    print("Positional arguments:", args)
    # kwargs - dictionary of named arguments
    print("Named arguments:", kwargs)

# Example of calling the function
my_function(1, 2, 3, name="Alice", age=30)

Output:

Positional arguments: (1, 2, 3)
Named arguments: {'name': 'Alice', 'age': 30}

They can also be used for unpacking collections when calling functions:

def another_function(a, b, c):
    print(f"a: {a}, b: {b}, c: {c}")

my_list = [10, 20, 30]
my_dict = {'a': 100, 'b': 200, 'c': 300}

# Unpacking list into positional arguments
another_function(*my_list)

# Unpacking dictionary into named arguments
another_function(**my_dict)

Unpacking is useful when passing arguments from one function to another or when working with APIs where the set of arguments can be dynamic.