What is the importance of overloading and overriding?

Answer 1

The only disadvantage of operator overloading is when it is used non-intuitively. All operators must behave with predictable results, thus it makes no sense to implement the plus (+) operator so that it behaves like a subtract (-) operator, or a multiply (*) operator, or indeed anything other than the intuitive sum of two objects.

Answer 2

Overloading in Java is the ability to create multiple methods of the same name, but with different parameters. The main advantage of this is cleanliness of code. Let's take the String.valueOf method. The overloaded versions of this method are defined as:

static String valueOf(boolean b)

static String valueOf(char c)

static String valueOf(char[] data)

static String valueOf(char[] data, int offset, int count)

static String valueOf(double d)

static String valueOf(float f)

static String valueOf(int i)

static String valueOf(long l)

static String valueOf(Object obj)

This means that if we have any type of variable, we can get a String representation of it by using String.valueOf(variable). If overloading was not allowed we'd have methods that look like this...

static String valueOfBoolean(boolean b)

static String valueOfChar(char c)

static String valueOfCharArray(char[] data)

static String valueOfCharArrayWithOffset(char[] data, int offset, int count)

static String valueOfDouble(double d)

static String valueOfFloat(float f)

static String valueOfInt(int i)

static String valueOfLong(long l)

static String valueOfObject(Object obj)

...which is very ugly and harder to read than the overloaded solution.

Answer 3

The advantage of operator overloading is that consumers can use your objects in an intuitive manner. For instance, it is clearly more intuitive to say x=42 than it would be to call a mutator member such as x.set(5). By the same token, if your class provides a sequential container then it is intuitive to be able to access the elements of that container using the subscript operator rather than calling a getter member.

The disadvantage of operator overloading is only when they are used inappropriately. If such a usage cannot be regarded as being intuitive or transparent to consumers, then it would be better to just not provide the operator at all (use member methods instead). For instance, if x=42 makes no logical sense with respect to your object, then it makes no sense to provide an operator=(const int) assignment operator overload in your object's class. And if your object does not represent a sequental container, then it makes no sense to provide an operator[](const size_t) subscript operator overload.

Answer 4

It's very handy when you create a class which does not follow, for instance, usual math operations. Overloading allows you to adopt operations on your class for your particular purposes.

Answer 5

overloading means same function but different arguments. so with overloading we can take different actions with different parameters....