Introduction to Programming

Overloading, overriding, and hiding

We have already mentioned method overriding and explained it in Chapter 2, Java Language Basics. Method overriding is replacing the methods implemented in a parent class (or default methods implemented in an interface) with the methods of the same signatures in the child class (or in the class that implements the interface, or in the child interface correspondingly). Method overloading is creating several methods with the same name and different parameters (thus, different signatures) in the same class or interface. In this section, we will discuss overriding and overloading the members of an interface, a class, and a class instance in more detail and will explain what hiding is as well. We start with an ...