title: What's implicit method call and explicit method call?
body: <p>I read about those terms in my python text book. I can't figure out the meaning by looking up the literal meaning of them. Could someone explain that to me or provide me some reference?</p>
  <p>--update the context of the term</p>
  <pre><code>i) (­42).__abs__() # Need parentheses to avoid confusing ... # ... method call '.' with decimal point
  j) (42).__mul__(2) # Even multiplication is a method call
  k) name.swapcase()
  l) name.title().swapcase() # name.title() is an object so ... m) name.upper().find('TOM') # ... we can “cascade” method calls.
  </code></pre>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Hopefully you now realise that most of the operations you've done so
  far in this course have actually been provided by implicitly calling
  methods of the objects (data items) that you've been working with.
  Indeed, all operators ('+', '*' etc) are just syntactic shortcuts for
  method calls, but only some of the built-in functions correspond to
  methods.</p>
  </blockquote>