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The default form of dispatch is static. To get dynamic dispatch the programmer must declare a method as virtual. C++ compilers typically implement dynamic dispatch with a data structure called a virtual function table (vtable) that defines the name-to-implementation mapping for a given class as a set of member function pointers. This is purely ...
An object's virtual method table will contain the addresses of the object's dynamically bound methods. Method calls are performed by fetching the method's address from the object's virtual method table. The virtual method table is the same for all objects belonging to the same class, and is therefore typically shared between them.
If the method choice depends on more than one type of object (such as other objects passed as parameters), it's called multiple dispatch. Dynamic dispatch works together with inheritance: if an object doesn't have the requested method, it looks up to its parent class , and continues up the chain until it finds the method or reaches the top.
As long as the new class definition had the same class and method names, the code would still work. In this sense it is similar to the traditional definition of late binding. Currently, it is popular to use the term late binding in Java programming as a synonym for dynamic dispatch.
In object-oriented programming, a class defines the shared aspects of objects created from the class. The capabilities of a class differ between programming languages, but generally the shared aspects consist of state and behavior that are each either associated with a particular object or with all objects of that class. [1] [2]
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]
When the associated visit method is called, its implementation is chosen based on both the dynamic type of the visitor and the static type of the element, as known from within the implementation of the accept method, which is the same as the dynamic type of the element. (As a bonus, if the visitor can't handle an argument of the given element's ...
In object-oriented programming, when a derived class inherits from a base class, an object of the derived class may be referred to via a pointer or reference of the base class type instead of the derived class type. If there are base class methods overridden by the derived class, the method actually called by such a reference or pointer can be ...