The object system allows programmers to build and use abstract data representations efficiently. It is also designed to allow multiple representations of abstract data to coexist in the same program.

A central concept in object abstraction is a generic function, which is a function that can accept values of multiple different types. We will consider three different techniques for implementing generic functions: shared interfaces, type dispatching, and type coercion. In the process of building up these concepts, we will also discover features of the Python object system that support the creation of generic functions.