An Alternative to Method Overloading
Understand Python's approach to method overloading by learning how it uses flexible parameters, type hints like Union, and single method definitions to handle multiple argument types. This lesson helps you adapt object-oriented design to Python's dynamic typing model while maintaining clear and robust code.
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Method overloading
One prominent feature of many object-oriented programming languages is a tool called method overloading. Method overloading refers to having multiple methods with the same name that accept different sets of parameters. 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’ve already seen that we only ...