Comment by bakery2k

That's the thing - it's documented as overloaded, because that's the most intuitive explanation. Wren would allow it to actually be implemented as an overloaded function.

Python doesn't support overloading, and it doesn't support optional arguments before required ones, so the actual implementation in Python is a bit messy - something like:

  def range(start_or_stop, optional_stop=None):
      if optional_stop is None:
          start = 0
          stop = start_or_stop
      else:
          start = start_or_stop
          stop = optional_stop
      ...