Polymorphism

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of objects, which can contain data and code: data in the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), and code in the form of procedures (often known as methods).

OOP has four main features:

Encapsulation

Wrapping data and code together into a single unit, like a gift.

Abstraction

Hiding unnecessary details and showing only the important ones, like a summary of a book.

Inheritance

Creating new objects based on existing objects, like a child inheriting traits from their parents.

Polymorphism

Allowing objects to behave differently depending on their type, like a car and a boat both being able to “move” but in different ways.

Polymorphism forms

In object-oriented programming, polymorphism is the provision of a single interface to entities of different types. The concept is borrowed from a principle in biology where an organism or species can have many different forms or stages.

The most commonly recognized major forms of polymorphism are:

Ad hoc polymorphism: defines a common interface for an arbitrary set of individually specified types.
Parametric polymorphism: not specifying concrete types and instead use abstract symbols that can substitute for any type.
Subtyping (also called subtype polymorphism or inclusion polymorphism): when a name denotes instances of many different classes related by some common superclass.

Ad hoc polymorphism

It is a kind of polymorphism in which polymorphic functions can be applied to arguments of different types, because a polymorphic function can denote a number of distinct and potentially heterogeneous implementations depending on the type of argument(s) to which it is applied.

Function overloading

Operator overloading