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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 ...
Python allows operator overloading through the implementation of methods with special names. [48] For example, the addition (+) operator can be overloaded by implementing the method obj.__add__(self, other). Ruby allows operator overloading as syntactic sugar for simple method calls.
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 the fourth and fifth cases, list concatenation must be invoked. In the last case, string concatenation must be invoked. Thus, the name + actually refers to three or four completely different functions. This is an example of overloading or more specifically, operator overloading. Note the ambiguity in the string types used in the last case.
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.
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]
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: