Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
As an example, an abstract base class MathSymbol may provide a pure virtual function doOperation(), and derived classes Plus and Minus implement doOperation() to provide concrete implementations. Implementing doOperation() would not make sense in the MathSymbol class, as MathSymbol is an abstract concept whose behaviour is defined solely for ...
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]
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.
For example, a programmer could use double dispatch in the following situations: Sorting a mixed set of objects: algorithms require that a list of objects be sorted into some canonical order. Deciding if one element comes before another element requires knowledge of both types and possibly some subset of the fields.
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.
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. A program holds a reference to an object which may be either a File object or a Database object. Which it is may have been determined by a run-time setting, and at this stage ...
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 ...