13 Overloading Methods
After reading lesson 13, you will be able to:
- Describe three ways to overload a method
- Write a class that contains an overloaded method(s)
- Call the overloaded method(s)
- Create overloaded constructor methods
This lesson introduces the topic of overloading methods in Java. In Java, a class cannot have two methods with the exact same method signature because the compiler would not be able to distinguish between the two methods. The Java compiler checks for this at compile time and generates an error message when this happens. But there are situations where the programmer needs to perform a similar function that is just slightly different, for example, maybe the number of values that are passed through as arguments to the method vary. To keep the code readable, it is helpful to give these methods the same name but allow them to have different method signatures.
Before discussing method overloading further, let’s review the nomenclature for a method signature. A parameter is a variable in a method signature, it includes a data type and variable. When a method is called, the arguments refer to the data you pass into the method's parameters. Figure 13.1 shows a code snippet describing the arguments as the variables passed to the method and the parameters are the variables that receive these values and are made available to the statements inside the method.
Figure 13.1 Code snippet identifying the arguments and parameters for a method call
