Method Overloading

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Method overloading, also known as function overloading, is the ability of a class to have multiple methods with the same name, granted that they differ in either number or type of arguments.

Compiler checks method signature for method overloading.

Method signature consists of three things -

Method name
Number of parameters
Types of parameters

If these three are same for any two methods in a class, then compiler throws duplicate method error.

This type of polymorphism is called static or compile time polymorphism because the appropriate method to be called is decided by the compiler during the compile time based on the argument list.

class Polymorph {

    public int add(int a, int b){
        return a + b;
    }
    
    public int add(int a, int b, int c){
        return a + b + c;
    }

    public float add(float a, float b){
        return a + b;
    }

    public static void main(String... args){
        Polymorph poly = new Polymorph();
        int a = 1, b = 2, c = 3;
        float d = 1.5, e = 2.5;

        System.out.println(poly.add(a, b));
        System.out.println(poly.add(a, b, c));
        System.out.println(poly.add(d, e));
    }

}

This will result in:

2
6
4.000000

Overloaded methods may be static or non-static. This also does not effect method overloading.

public class Polymorph {

    private static void methodOverloaded()
    {
        //No argument, private static method
    }
 
    private int methodOverloaded(int i)
    {
        //One argument private non-static method
        return i;
    }
 
    static int methodOverloaded(double d)
    {
        //static Method
        return 0;
    }
 
    public void methodOverloaded(int i, double d)
    {
        //Public non-static Method
    }
}

Also if you change the return type of method, we are unable to get it as method overloading.

public class Polymorph {  

void methodOverloaded(){
    //No argument and No return type
}

int methodOverloaded(){
    //No argument and int return type 
    return 0;
}

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