Overloading and Inheritance

Overloading allows several function definitions for the same name, distinguished primarily through different argument types; it is typically resolved at compile-time. Inheritance allows subclasses to define more special versions of the same function; it is typically resolved at run-time. Modern object-oriented languages incorporate both features, usually in a type-safe manner. However, the combination of these features sometimes turns out to have surprising, and even counterintuitive, effects. We discuss why we consider these effects inappropriate, and suggest alternatives. We explore the design space by isolating the main issues involved and analyzing their interplay and suggest a formal framework describing static overloading resolution and dynamic function selection, abstracting from other language features. We believe that our framework clarifies the thought process going on at lan-