I know that Python does not support method overloading, but I&#39;ve run into a problem that I can&#39;t seem to solve in a nice Pythonic way.

I am making a game where a character needs to shoot a variety of bullets, but how do I write different functions for creating these bullets? For example suppose I have a function that creates a bullet travelling from point A to B with a given speed. I would write a function like this:

    def add_bullet(sprite, start, headto, speed):
        # Code ...

But I want to write other functions for creating bullets like:

    def add_bullet(sprite, start, direction, speed):
    def add_bullet(sprite, start, headto, spead, acceleration):
    def add_bullet(sprite, script): # For bullets that are controlled by a script
    def add_bullet(sprite, curve, speed): # for bullets with curved paths
    # And so on ...

And so on with many variations. Is there a better way to do it without using so many keyword arguments cause its getting kinda ugly fast. Renaming each function is pretty bad too because you get either `add_bullet1`, `add_bullet2`, or `add_bullet_with_really_long_name`.

To address some answers:

1. No I can&#39;t create a Bullet class hierarchy because thats too slow. The actual code for managing bullets is in C and my functions are wrappers around C API.

2. I know about the keyword arguments but checking for all sorts of combinations of parameters is getting annoying, but default arguments help allot like `acceleration=0`


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Python function overloading