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You're reading from  Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inAug 2015
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781784398781
Edition1st Edition
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Dusty Phillips
Dusty Phillips
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Dusty Phillips

Dusty Phillips is a Canadian software developer and an author currently living in New Brunswick. He has been active in the open-source community for 2 decades and has been programming in Python for nearly as long. He holds a master's degree in computer science and has worked for Facebook, the United Nations, and several startups.
Read more about Dusty Phillips

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An alternative to method overloading


One prominent feature of many object-oriented programming languages is a tool called method overloading. Method overloading simply refers to having multiple methods with the same name that accept different sets of arguments. In statically typed languages, this is useful if we want to have a method that accepts either an integer or a string, for example. In non-object-oriented languages, we might need two functions, called add_s and add_i, to accommodate such situations. In statically typed object-oriented languages, we'd need two methods, both called add, one that accepts strings, and one that accepts integers.

In Python, we only need one method, which accepts any type of object. It may have to do some testing on the object type (for example, if it is a string, convert it to an integer), but only one method is required.

However, method overloading is also useful when we want a method with the same name to accept different numbers or sets of arguments. For...

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Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition
Published in: Aug 2015Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781784398781

Author (1)

author image
Dusty Phillips

Dusty Phillips is a Canadian software developer and an author currently living in New Brunswick. He has been active in the open-source community for 2 decades and has been programming in Python for nearly as long. He holds a master's degree in computer science and has worked for Facebook, the United Nations, and several startups.
Read more about Dusty Phillips