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Function overloading is usually associated with statically-typed programming languages that enforce type checking in function calls. An overloaded function is a set of different functions that are callable with the same name. For any particular call, the compiler determines which overloaded function to use and resolves this at compile time ...
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 ...
C++ does not have the keyword super that a subclass can use in Java to invoke the superclass version of a method that it wants to override. Instead, the name of the parent or base class is used followed by the scope resolution operator. For example, the following code presents two classes, the base class Rectangle, and the derived class Box.
In a language supporting double dispatch, this is slightly more costly, because the compiler must generate code to calculate the method's offset in the method table at runtime, thereby increasing the overall instruction path length (by an amount that is likely to be no more than the total number of calls to the function, which may not be very ...
And even if methods owned by the base class call the virtual method, they will instead be calling the derived method. Overloading occurs when two or more methods in one class have the same method name but different parameters. Overriding means having two methods with the same method name and parameters. Overloading is also referred to as ...
Method overloading, on the other hand, refers to differentiating the code used to handle a message based on the parameters of the method. If one views the receiving object as the first parameter in any method then overriding is just a special case of overloading where the selection is based only on the first argument.
By contrast, some languages dispatch methods or functions based on the combination of operands; in the division case, the types of the dividend and divisor together determine which divide operation will be performed. This is known as multiple dispatch. Examples of languages that support multiple dispatch are Common Lisp, Dylan, and Julia.
The following example is in the language Java, and shows how the contents of a tree of nodes (in this case describing the components of a car) can be printed. Instead of creating print methods for each node subclass ( Wheel , Engine , Body , and Car ), one visitor class ( CarElementPrintVisitor ) performs the required printing action.