In the prior chapter, we began exploring Python’s core object types in depth with a look at Python numbers. We’ll resume our object type tour in the next chapter, but before we move on, it’s important that you get a handle on what may be the most fundamental idea in Python programming and is certainly the basis of much of both the conciseness and flexibility of the Python language—dynamic typing, and the polymorphism it yields.

As you’ll see here and later in this book, in Python, we do not declare the specific types of the objects our scripts use. In fact, programs should not even care about specific types; in exchange, they are naturally applicable in more contexts than we can sometimes even plan ahead for. Because dynamic typing is the root of this flexibility, let’s take a brief look at the model here.