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Concept
Function overloading
Summary
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 depending on context.
For example, and are overloaded functions. To call the latter, an object must be passed as a parameter, whereas the former does not require a parameter, and is called with an empty parameter field. A common error would be to assign a default value to the object in the second function, which would result in an ambiguous call error, as the compiler wouldn't know which of the two methods to use.
Another example is a function that executes different actions based on whether it's printing text or photos. The two different functions may be overloaded as . If we write the overloaded print functions for all objects our program will "print", we never have to worry about the type of the object, and the correct function call again, the call is always: .
Languages which support function overloading include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:
Apex
C
C++
C#
Clojure
Swift
Fortran
Kotlin
Java
Julia
PostgreSQL and PL/SQL
Scala
TypeScript
Wolfram Language
Elixir
Nim
Crystal
The same function name is used for more than one function definition
The functions must differ either by the arity or types of their parameters
It is a classification of static polymorphism in which a function call is resolved using some "best match" algorithm, where the particular function to call is resolved by finding the best match of the formal parameter types with the actual parameter types. The details of this algorithm vary from language to language.
Function overloading is usually associated with statically-typed programming languages that enforce type checking in function calls. An overloaded function is really just a set of different functions that happen to have the same name.
Official source
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