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Method overloading, on the other hand, refers to differentiating the code used to handle a message based on the parameters of the method. If one views the receiving object as the first parameter in any method then overriding is just a special case of overloading where the selection is based only on the first argument.
Overloading occurs when two or more methods in one class have the same method name but different parameters. Overriding means having two methods with the same method name and parameters. Overloading is also referred to as function matching, and overriding as dynamic function mapping.
In some programming languages, function overloading or method overloading is the ability to create multiple functions of the same name with different implementations. Calls to an overloaded function will run a specific implementation of that function appropriate to the context of the call, allowing one function call to perform different tasks ...
Method overriding, in object-oriented programming, is a language feature that allows a subclass or child class to provide a specific implementation of a method that is already provided by one of its superclasses or parent classes.
The previous section notwithstanding, there are other ways in which ad hoc polymorphism can work out. Consider for example the Smalltalk language. In Smalltalk, the overloading is done at run time, as the methods ("function implementation") for each overloaded message ("overloaded function") are resolved when they are about to be executed.
Multiple dispatch is used much more heavily in Julia, where multiple dispatch was a central design concept from the origin of the language: collecting the same statistics as Muschevici on the average number of methods per generic function, it was found that the Julia standard library uses more than double the amount of overloading than in the ...
By contrast, dynamic dispatch is based on the type of the calling object, meaning it uses virtual functions (overriding) instead of function overloading, and does result in a vtable lookup. Consider the following example, written in C++ , of collisions in a game:
class Object {public: virtual void update {// no-op} virtual void draw {// no-op} virtual void collide (Object objects []) {// no-op}}; class Visible: public Object {Model * model; public: virtual void draw override {// code to draw a model at the position of this object}}; class Solid: public Object {public: virtual void collide (Object objects []) override {// code to check for and react to ...