What is the difference between overloading and overriding

Overriding is a run-time concept while overloading is a compile-time concept. In the example above, the dog variable is declared to be a Dog.

During compile time, the compiler checks if the Dog class has the bark method. As long as the Dog class has the bark method, the code compilers.

At run-time, a Hound is created and assigned to dog. This is called Dynamic Polymorphism. In this overloading example, the two bark method can be invoked by using different parameters.

Compiler know they are different because they have different method signature method name and method parameter list. References: 1 Defining Method. This tutorial is from Oracle, it explains the components of a method and which of them are used by compiler to differentiate methods. Great article! You have well done the difference between Overriding and Overloading in Java which is very important concepts in Java.

I am also java developer suddenly I got confused in java overriding concept. Across your article, you made it very clear and easy to understand the concept. Which is having detailed information with related images and explanation about overriding and overloading in java.

Thank you for this wonderful article. Author is right. Once we override a function then it cannot be used in that class.

Method overriding means having two methods with the same arguments, but different implementations. One of them would exist in the parent class, while another will be in the derived, or child class. In case of method overloading, parameter must be different. In case of method overriding, parameter must be same. In java, method overloading can't be performed by changing return type of the method only. Return type can be same or different in method overloading. Subscribe to my newsletter and never miss my upcoming articles.

Method overloading and overriding are two common forms of polymorphism the ability for a method or class to have multiple forms in C that are often confused because of their similar sounding names. In this article, we show the difference between the two with some practical code examples. Overloading is the ability to have multiple methods within the same class with the same name, but with different parameters. Each of these methods has their own implementation as well, meaning that they can behave differently depending on what is passed in.

Overloading is known as compile-time or static polymorphism because each of the different overloaded methods is resolved when the application is compiled. Here we 4 different methods each with completely different names, each of which performs basically the same the same function, just on different types and amounts of parameters.

It's a pretty confusing interface to deal with because you've got to remember the name and parameters for each different method.

Now all of the methods are just called Add, which is a much simpler interface to deal with as a programmer. We can simply call the Add method with the parameters that we have, and the compiler will automatically work out for us which actual implementation to use! Overriding, on the other hand, is the ability to redefine the implementation of a method in a class that inherits from a parent class.

When a method is overridden, the name and the parameters stay the same, but the implementation that gets called depends on the type of the object that's calling it. Overriding is known as runtime or dynamic polymorphism because the type of the calling object is not known until runtime, and therefore the method implementation that runs is determined at runtime.