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In programming language theory and type theory, polymorphism is the use of a single symbol to represent multiple different types. [1] In object-oriented programming, polymorphism is the provision of a single interface to entities of different types. [2] The concept is borrowed from a principle in biology where an organism or species can have ...
Composition over inheritance (or composite reuse principle) in object-oriented programming (OOP) is the principle that classes should favor polymorphic behavior and code reuse by their composition (by containing instances of other classes that implement the desired functionality) over inheritance from a base or parent class. [ 2 ]
In computer science, polymorphic recursion (also referred to as Milner – Mycroft typability or the Milner–Mycroft calculus) refers to a recursive parametrically polymorphic function where the type parameter changes with each recursive invocation made, instead of staying constant. Type inference for polymorphic recursion is equivalent to ...
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 ...
Operator overloading is syntactic sugar, and is used because it allows programming using notation nearer to the target domain [ 1 ] and allows user-defined types a similar level of syntactic support as types built into a language. It is common, for example, in scientific computing, where it allows computing representations of mathematical ...
Objects are instances of a class. Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of objects, [ 1 ] which can contain data and code: data in the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), and code in the form of procedures (often known as methods).
In class-based programming, downcasting, or type refinement, is the act of casting a base or parent class reference, to a more restricted derived class reference. [1] This is only allowable if the object is already an instance of the derived class, and so this conversion is inherently fallible. In many environments, type introspection can be ...
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 ...