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Function Overloading

Function Overloading

Explore function overloading, its benefits, and its use cases.

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Introduction

Function overloading is a feature in C++ that allows us to create multiple functions with the same name but different parameter lists. This means we can define multiple versions of a function, each catering to different data types or different numbers of parameters. This feature provides us with the flexibility to create functions that perform similar operations on different data types or with different numbers of parameters.

Overloading functions with the same name but differing only in their return type is not allowed in C++.

In the following code, we have created two functions with the same name, i.e., sum but with a different number of parameters. The first function takes two integers as parameters, whereas the second function takes three integers.

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C++
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
// Function to sum two integers
int sum(int a, int b)
{
    return a + b;
}
// Function to sum three integers (overloaded function)
int sum(int a, int b, int c)
{
    return a + b + c;
}
int main() {
    int result1 = sum(3, 4);
    int result2 = sum(3, 4, 5);
    cout << "Sum of 3 and 4: " << result1 << endl;
    cout << "Sum of 3, 4, and 5: " << result2 << endl;
    return 0;
}

Benefits of function overloading

Functional overloading in C++ provides several advantages over conventional ...