Class notes POLYMOSPHISM

POLYMORPHISM

The word “polymorphism” means having many forms. In simple words, we can define polymorphism
as the ability of a message to be displayed in more than one form. A real-life example of
polymorphism is a person who at the same time can have different characteristics. A man at the
same time is a father, a husband, and an

employee. So the same person exhibits different behavior in different situations. This is called
polymorphism. Polymorphism is considered one of the important features of Object-Oriented
Programming. Types of Polymorphism

 Compile-time Polymorphism

 Runtime Polymorphism

Operator Overloading

Operator overloading is a compile-time polymorphism. It is an idea of giving special meaning to an
existing operator in C++ without changing its original meaning.

It has the ability to provide the operators with a special meaning for a data type, this ability is known
as operator overloading. Operator overloading is a compile-time polymorphism. For example, we
can overload an operator ‘+’ in a class like String so that we can concatenate two strings by just using
+. Example:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

class Complex {

private:

int real, imag;

public:

Complex(int r = 0, int i = 0)

{

real = r;

imag = i;

}

// This is automatically called when '+' is used with between two Complex objects Complex
operator+(Complex const& obj)

{

Complex res;

res.real = real + obj.real;

res.imag = imag + obj.imag;