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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 ...
When overriding one method with another, the signatures of the two methods must be identical (and with same visibility). In C#, class methods, indexers, properties and events can all be overridden. Non-virtual or static methods cannot be overridden. The overridden base method must be virtual, abstract, or override.
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.
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.
In computer science, dynamic dispatch is the process of selecting which implementation of a polymorphic operation (method or function) to call at run time.It is commonly employed in, and considered a prime characteristic of, object-oriented programming (OOP) languages and systems.
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: