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In computer science, polymorphism means allowing a single definition to be used with different types of data (specifically, different classes of objects). For instance, a polymorphic function definition can replace several type-specific ones, and a single polymorphic operator can act in expressions of various types. Many programming languages and paradigms implement some forms of polymorphism; for a popular example, see polymorphism in object-oriented programming. The concept of polymorphism applies to data types in addition to functions. A function that can evaluate to and be applied to values of different types is known as a polymorphic function. A data type that contains elements of different types is known as a polymorphic data type. There are two fundamentally different kinds of polymorphism, as first informally described by Christopher Strachey in 1967. If the range of actual types that can be used is finite and the combinations must be specified individually prior to use, it is called ad-hoc polymorphism. If all code is written without mention of any specific type and thus can be used transparently with any number of new types, it is called parametric polymorphism. In their formal treatment of the topic in 1985, Luca Cardelli and Peter Wegner later restricted the term parametric polymorphism to instances with type parameters, recognizing also other kinds of universal polymorphism. Programming using parametric polymorphism is called generic programming, particularly in the object-oriented community. Advocates of object-oriented programming often cite polymorphism as one of the major benefits of that paradigm over others. Advocates of functional programming reject this claim on the grounds that the notion of parametric polymorphism is so deeply ingrained in many statically typed functional programming languages that most programmers simply take it for granted. However, the rise in popularity of object-oriented programming languages did contribute greatly to awareness and use of polymorphism in the mainstream programming community.

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