Methods of the same name can be declared in the same class, as long as they have different sets of parameters (determined by the number, types and order of the parameters)—this is called method overloading. When an overloaded method is called, the compiler selects the appropriate method by examining the number, types and order of the arguments in the call. Method overloading is commonly used to create several methods with the same name that perform the same or similar tasks, but on different types or different numbers of arguments. For example, Math
methods abs
, min
and max
(summarized in Section D.3) are overloaded with four versions each:
1. One with two double
parameters.
2. One with two float
parameters.
3. One with two int
parameters.
4. One with two long
parameters.
Our next example demonstrates declaring and invoking overloaded methods. We demonstrate overloaded constructors in Appendix F.