This is getting a little off-topic now, but let me add something about Perl 6 here.

In Perl 6 subs and methods have real signatures, and multi subs and methods (what we call "overloaded" in this thread) are a fundamental mechanism to extend the language.

One example (straight from S13) is the case where you want to add language dependent case conversion rules. Instead of hacking in locales, you'd just define a type TurkishStr, and a sub multi sub uc(TurkisStr $str) { ... } converts a small i with dot to İ (capital letter I with dot above). Then uc($str) will do what I mean, in all cases.

Presumably TurkishStr inherits from the normal Str class, so that all other operations (like substr, index etc) remain unchanged for that type.

Since multi dispatch is a rather fundamental for extending the language, it is very sophisticated and takes into account arity, types, subset types and type breakers (like type narrowness and default fallbacks).

In reply to Re^2: Function overloading in perl by moritz
in thread Function overloading in perl by vinoth.ree

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