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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.
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.
Impredicative polymorphism (also called first-class polymorphism) is the most powerful form of parametric polymorphism. [1]: 340 In formal logic, a definition is said to be impredicative if it is self-referential; in type theory, it refers to the ability for a type to be in the domain of a quantifier it contains. This allows the instantiation ...
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 ...
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.)
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 ...
Less trivial examples include parametric types like lists. While polymorphism in general means that operations accept values of more than one type, the polymorphism used here is parametric. One finds the notation of type schemes in the literature, too, emphasizing the parametric nature of the polymorphism. Additionally, constants may be typed ...