Re: Polymorphism vs. Overloading

Gabriela O. de Vivo <gdevivo@conicit.ve> wrote:
:
: Last week I was invited to join a Thesis (MsC) presentation.
: At some point a question raised about the exact difference between
: Polymorphism and Overloading.
:
An overloaded function does *different* things to different types.
A polymorphic function does *the same* thing to different types.


An overloaded function must examine the type of x and decide what to do
based on that type. An overloaded function whose argument can be integer
or real, for example, must be implemented using two entirely different
operations.


A polymorphic function, on the other hand, partially ignores the type of x.
It does the same thing (list concatenation, for example) to arguments of
various types. The collection of types that a polymorphic function will
accept might be described in terms of classes, but this is language dependent.


--
--Bill Kinnersley
    billk@cs.ukans.edu
--

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