twoples.py

Hey Andrew! This can be frustrating, for sure. Here's how I did this challenge:

First, defining the function and the parameter(s). With the *args pattern, you're telling python to take any and all arguments passed to a function and put them into a tuple. The key opperand here is the star. It's convention to use the name args after the star, though. So, here's what it looks like:

def multiply(*args):

And here's what it looks like behind the scenes when you pass it some arguments.

>>> multiply(1, 3, 5, 7, 8)
#*args takes these numbers and puts them in a tuple, so
args = (1, 3, 5, 7, 8)
>>>multiply('string', ['list', 'of', 'whatever'], 7)
#again, all of the arguments, whether it's one or one thousand, is put in a tuple
args = ('string', ['list', 'of', 'whatever'], 7)

So now that the function takes any number of arguments, and puts them into a tuple, we can loop through the tuple with a for loop. First, though, we should create a number variable that we can use as a base for our final value. Since we're multiplying, I set that variable to 1.

def multiply(*args):
    num = 1
    for arg in args:
        num *= arg
    return num

This makes it so that the first arg in the for loop is multiplied by 1, and then each number after that is multiplied by the product of the previous numbers. Again, args is just the conventional name. This could be rewritten like this and be the exact same thing:

def multiply(*nums):
    num = 1
    for thing in nums:
        num *= thing
    return num

It's the asterisk that matters. Hopefully this clears things up a bit, if not, feel free to ask any questions. Happy coding! :)