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overloading Last modified: Monday, August 05, 2002

(1) In programming languages, a feature that allows an object to have different meanings depending on its context. The term is used most often in reference to operators that can behave differently depending on the data type, or class, of the operands. For example, x+y can mean different things depending on whether x and y are simple integers or complex data structures. Not all programming languages support overloading but it is a feature of most object-oriented languages, including C++ and Java. Overloading is one type of polymorphism. (2) Another name for port address translation.