Concept
Multiple dispatch
Related concepts (22)
Object-oriented programming
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), and the code is in the form of procedures (often known as methods). A common feature of objects is that procedures (or methods) are attached to them and can access and modify the object's data fields. In this brand of OOP, there is usually a special name such as or used to refer to the current object.
Julia (programming language)
Julia is a high-level, general-purpose dynamic programming language. Its features are well suited for numerical analysis and computational science. Distinctive aspects of Julia's design include a type system with parametric polymorphism in a dynamic programming language; with multiple dispatch as its core programming paradigm. Julia supports concurrent, (composable) parallel and distributed computing (with or without using MPI or the built-in corresponding to "OpenMP-style" threads), and direct calling of C and Fortran libraries without glue code.
Clojure
Clojure (ˈkloʊʒər, like closure) is a dynamic and functional dialect of the Lisp programming language on the Java platform. Like most other Lisps, Clojure's syntax is built on S-expressions that are first parsed into data structures by a reader before being compiled. Clojure's reader supports literal syntax for maps, sets and vectors along with lists, and these are compiled to the mentioned structures directly. Clojure treats code as data and has a Lisp macro system.
Polymorphism (computer science)
In programming language theory and type theory, polymorphism is the provision of a single interface to entities of different types or the use of a single symbol to represent multiple different types. The concept is borrowed from a principle in biology where an organism or species can have many different forms or stages. The most commonly recognized major classes of polymorphism are: Ad hoc polymorphism: defines a common interface for an arbitrary set of individually specified types.
Function overloading
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.
Comparison of programming languages
Programming languages are used for controlling the behavior of a machine (often a computer). Like natural languages, programming languages follow rules for syntax and semantics. There are thousands of programming languages and new ones are created every year. Few languages ever become sufficiently popular that they are used by more than a few people, but professional programmers may use dozens of languages in a career. Most programming languages are not standardized by an international (or national) standard, even widely used ones, such as Perl or Standard ML (despite the name).
Type system
In computer programming, a type system is a logical system comprising a set of rules that assigns a property called a type (for example, integer, floating point, string) to every "term" (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols). Usually the terms are various constructs of a computer program, such as variables, expressions, functions, or modules. A type system dictates the operations that can be performed on a term. For variables, the type system determines the allowed values of that term.
R (programming language)
R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners, bioinformaticians and statisticians for data analysis and developing statistical software. The core R language is augmented by a large number of extension packages containing reusable code and documentation. According to user surveys and studies of scholarly literature databases, R is one of the most commonly used programming languages in data mining.
Operator (computer programming)
In computer programming, operators are constructs defined within programming languages which behave generally like functions, but which differ syntactically or semantically. Common simple examples include arithmetic (e.g. addition with +), comparison (e.g. "greater than" with >), and logical operations (e.g. AND, also written && in some languages). More involved examples include assignment (usually = or :=), field access in a record or object (usually .), and the scope resolution operator (often :: or .).
Late binding
In computing, late binding or dynamic linkage—though not an identical process to dynamically linking imported code libraries—is a computer programming mechanism in which the method being called upon an object, or the function being called with arguments, is looked up by name at runtime. In other words, a name is associated with a particular operation or object at runtime, rather than during compilation. The name dynamic binding is sometimes used, but is more commonly used to refer to dynamic scope.