What is polymorphism in programming?
Polymorphism is the capability of a method to do different things based on the object that it is acting upon. In other words, polymorphism allows you define one interface and have multiple implementations. I know it sounds confusing. Don’t worry we will discuss this in detail.
It is a feature that allows one interface to be used for a general class of actions.
An operation may exhibit different behavior in different instances.
The behavior depends on the types of data used in the operation.
It plays an important role in allowing objects having different internal structures to share the same external interface.
Polymorphism is extensively used in implementing inheritance.
Following concepts demonstrate different types of polymorphism in java.
1) Method Overloading
2) Method Overriding
Method Definition:
A method is a set of code which is referred to by name and can be called (invoked) at any point in a program simply by utilizing the method’s name.
1)Method Overloading:
In Java, it is possible to define two or more methods of same name in a class, provided that there argument list or parameters are different. This concept is known as Method Overloading.
I have covered method overloading and Overriding below. To know more about polymorphism types refer my post Types of polymorphism in java: Static, Dynamic, Runtime and Compile time Polymorphism.
1) Method Overloading
To call an overloaded method in Java, it is must to use the type and/or number of arguments to determine which version of the overloaded method to actually call.
Overloaded methods may have different return types; the return type alone is insufficient to distinguish two versions of a method. .
When Java encounters a call to an overloaded method, it simply executes the version of the method whose parameters match the arguments used in the call.
It allows the user to achieve compile time polymorphism.
An overloaded method can throw different exceptions.
It can have different access modifiers.