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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.
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 ...
Polymorphism can be distinguished by when the implementation is selected: statically (at compile time) or dynamically (at run time, typically via a virtual function). This is known respectively as static dispatch and dynamic dispatch, and the corresponding forms of polymorphism are accordingly called static polymorphism and dynamic polymorphism.
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.
Multiple dispatch can be added to Python using a library extension. For example, using the module multimethod.py [13] and also with the module multimethods.py [14] which provides CLOS-style multimethods for Python without changing the underlying syntax or keywords of the language.
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.
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.
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. Their implementations differ.