the strange arguments of range

range() takes 1 positional argument and two optional arguments, and interprets these arguments differently depending on how many arguments you passed in.

If only one argument was passed in, it is assumed to be the stop argument, otherwise that first argument is interpreted as the start instead.

In reality, range(), coded in C, takes a variable number of arguments. You could emulate that like this:

def foo(*params):
    if 3 < len(params) < 1:
        raise ValueError('foo takes 1 - 3 arguments')
    elif len(params) == 1
        b = params[0]
    elif:
        a, b = params[:2]
    c = params[2] if len(params) > 2 else 1

but you could also just swap arguments:

def range(start, stop=None, step=1):
    if stop is None:
        start, stop = 0, start

range does not take keyword arguments:

range(start=0,stop=10)
TypeError: range() takes no keyword arguments

it takes 1, 2 or 3 positional arguments, they are evaluated according to their number:

range(stop)              # 1 argument
range(start, stop)       # 2 arguments
range(start, stop, step) # 3 arguments

i.e. it is not possible to create a range with defined stop and step and default start.