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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.
Duck typing is similar to, but distinct from, structural typing.Structural typing is a static typing system that determines type compatibility and equivalence by a type's structure, whereas duck typing is dynamic and determines type compatibility by only that part of a type's structure that is accessed during runtime.
In the above example, the function Base<Derived>::interface(), though declared before the existence of the struct Derived is known by the compiler (i.e., before Derived is declared), is not actually instantiated by the compiler until it is actually called by some later code which occurs after the declaration of Derived (not shown in the above ...
Polymorphism is the phenomenon wherein somewhat interchangeable objects each expose an operation of the same name but possibly differing in behavior. As an example, a File object and a Database object both have a StoreRecord method that can be used to write a personnel record to storage. Their implementations differ.
Ad hoc polymorphism is a dispatch mechanism: control moving through one named function is dispatched to various other functions without having to specify the exact function being called. Overloading allows multiple functions taking different types to be defined with the same name; the compiler or interpreter automatically ensures that the right ...
In programming language theory, subtyping (also called subtype polymorphism or inclusion polymorphism) is a form of type polymorphism.A subtype is a datatype that is related to another datatype (the supertype) by some notion of substitutability, meaning that program elements (typically subroutines or functions), written to operate on elements of the supertype, can also operate on elements of ...
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.
For example, in the GHC standard library, the class IArray expresses a general immutable array interface. In this class, the type class constraint IArray a e means that a is an array type that contains elements of type e. (This restriction on polymorphism is used to implement unboxed array types, for example.)