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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 ...
Multiple dispatch or multimethods is a feature of some programming languages in which a function or method can be dynamically dispatched based on the run-time (dynamic) type or, in the more general case, some other attribute of more than one of its arguments. [1]
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.
Often the compiler selects the overload to call based on the type of the input arguments or it fails if the input arguments do not select an overload. Older and weakly-typed languages generally do not support overloading. Here is an example of overloading in C++, two functions Area that accept different types:
C++ also has complex language features, such as classes, templates, namespaces, and operator overloading, that alter the meaning of specific symbols based on context or usage. Meta-data about these features can be disambiguated by mangling (decorating) the name of a symbol. Because the name-mangling systems for such features are not ...
Christopher Strachey chose the term ad hoc polymorphism to refer to polymorphic functions that can be applied to arguments of different types, but that behave differently depending on the type of the argument to which they are applied (also known as function overloading or operator overloading). [5]
Scala treats all operators as methods and thus allows operator overloading by proxy. In Raku, the definition of all operators is delegated to lexical functions, and so, using function definitions, operators can be overloaded or new operators added. For example, the function defined in the Rakudo source for incrementing a Date object with "+" is:
C++ does not have the keyword super that a subclass can use in Java to invoke the superclass version of a method that it wants to override. Instead, the name of the parent or base class is used followed by the scope resolution operator. For example, the following code presents two classes, the base class Rectangle, and the derived class Box.