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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 ...
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.
Multiple dispatch should be distinguished from function overloading, in which static typing information, such as a term's declared or inferred type (or base type in a language with subtyping) is used to determine which of several possibilities will be used at a given call site, and that determination is made at compile or link time (or some ...
Often the compiler selects the overload to call based on the type of the input arguments or it fails if the input arguments do not select an overload. Older and weakly-typed languages generally do not support overloading. Here is an example of overloading in C++, two functions Area that accept different types:
Illustration. 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.
This is because the definition of function overloading only accounts for the function name, parameter type list and the enclosing namespace (if any). It does not account for the return type. [4] However, these functions can still be called by explicitly indicating the signature to the compiler, as demonstrated by the following program.
The linker needs a great deal of information on each program entity. For example, to correctly link a function it needs its name, the number of arguments and their types, and so on. The simple programming languages of the 1970s, like C, only distinguished subroutines by their name, ignoring other information including parameter and return types.
The term overloading may refer to: Function overloading , a software engineering process whereby multiple functions of different types are defined with the same name Operator overloading , a software engineering process whereby operators (e.g. + or - ) are treated as polymorphic functions having different behaviors depending on the types of ...