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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.
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 ...
Polymorphism can be distinguished by when the implementation is selected: statically (at compile time) or dynamically (at run time, typically via a virtual function). This is known respectively as static dispatch and dynamic dispatch, and the corresponding forms of polymorphism are accordingly called static polymorphism and dynamic polymorphism.
This type of polymorphism is common in object-oriented programming languages, many of which allow operators to be overloaded in a manner similar to functions (see operator overloading). Some languages that are not dynamically typed and lack ad hoc polymorphism (including type classes) have longer function names such as print_int, print_string ...
Operator overloading has often been criticized [2] because it allows programmers to reassign the semantics of operators depending on the types of their operands. For example, the use of the << operator in C++ a << b shifts the bits in the variable a left by b bits if a and b are of an integer type, but if a is an output stream then the above ...
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.
The C++ examples in this section demonstrate the principle of using composition and interfaces to achieve code reuse and polymorphism. Due to the C++ language not having a dedicated keyword to declare interfaces, the following C++ example uses inheritance from a pure abstract base class .
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.