overload : Java Glossary

2007-07-30 by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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overload

Having two functions with the same name in the same method, but that differ in the types of their arguments. It is not legal to have two methods of the same name that differ only in their return types. Be careful. The rules for figuring out exactly which version of a method get invoked are baroque.O

When you have overloaded methods, Java decides at compile time which variant method to use. Thus it must make its decisions based on the declared types of the references, not the types of corresponding run-time Objects. So for example:

In contrast, the Nice programming language does the matching at run time, based on the run-time types of the Objects.

Java’s general rule is to use the most specific matching method.

@Override
DEBE
gotchas
Nice
println’s use overloaded methods and toString
shadow
subclass
super
superclass

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