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Regarding Polymorphism

 
Greenhorn
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How would you explain Compile time and Runtime polymorphism? And also can someone explain me about dynamic dispatch?
[ April 11, 2007: Message edited by: Rick Charles ]
 
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Polymorphism:
Definition of Richard G. Baldwin (His Introductory Java Programming Tutorial will get you started):
compile-time polymorphism: method overloading
runtime polymorphism: method overriding and inheritance

Dynamic dispatch is explained in wikipedia.

Regards, Jan
[ April 11, 2007: Message edited by: Jan Cumps ]
 
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Sounds more like a beginner's question to me.

I thought polymorphism was only seen at runtime. You will find lots of examples. Imagine you have a superclass, and you have subclasses; they can have methods which have the same signature (overridden) which use different operations. Example:-At compile time all the compiler will notice is that each of these three concrete classes extends Shape, and has a getArea() method. Also that the return types are compatible (in this case all the same, double).
Now, at runtime, you can create different subclasses of Shape:Your compiler can't tell whether you will enter 1 for Circle or 2 for Square or 3 for Triangle. But each has a getArea() method which the JVM finds and uses at Runtime.

try it
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