Receiving Tuples and Lists in Functions

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.