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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 ...
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.
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.
We then iterate over one of the lists (SHAPE), allowing elements of the other (SURFACE) to visit each of them in turn. In the example code above, SURFACE objects are visiting SHAPE objects. The code makes a polymorphic call on {SURFACE}.draw indirectly by way of the `drawing_agent', which is the first call (dispatch) of the double-dispatch pattern.
In computer programming, predicate dispatch is a generalisation of multiple dispatch ("multimethods") that allows the method to call to be selected at runtime based on arbitrary decidable logical predicates and/or pattern matching attached to a method declaration.
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.
Examples are templates in C++, and generic programming in Fortran and other languages, in conjunction with function overloading (including operator overloading). Code is said to be monomorphised , with specific data types deduced and traced through the call graph , in order to instantiate specific versions of generic functions , and select ...
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.