Positional Arguments

Arguments that are called by their position in the function definition.

def full_name(first_name, last_name):
    print(first_name, last_name)

print(full_name("Hemanta", "Sundaray"))
# Hemanta Sundaray

Here, first_name will be mapped to Hemanta while last_name will be mapped to Sundaray due to the position of the arguments when calling the function.

Keyword Arguments

Arguments that are called by their name.

def full_name(first_name, last_name):
    print(first_name, last_name)

print(full_name(last_name = "Sundaray", first_name = "Hemanta"))
# Hemanta Sundaray

Here, we are using the parameter names first_name and last_name as keyword arguments in the function call. Notice the order of the arguments does not matter since they are assigned a specific name.

Default Arguments

Arguments that are given default values.

def full_name(first_name = "Hemanta", last_name = "Sundaray"):
    print(first_name, last_name)

print(full_name())
# Hemanta Sundaray

Here, in the function definition, we assign default values to the parameters. This means we can call our function without providing any arguments because they will have a value to fall back onto.