From: Su Zhang <zhangsu@...>
Date: 2011-01-18T10:09:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Why Ruby Does Not Support Method Overloading?

Method overloading is ideally a feature only for statically typed
language, in which the binding of method names can be easily made at
compile time. Function/method names as well as the statically typed
formal parameters are all parts of the formal names used during early
binding. However, with a dynamically typed language (especially those
who have a method dispatch implementation similar to Smalltalk), only
the method name is considered part of the formal message content during
method dispatch (late binding).

From my understanding, taking the number of arguments, runtime type of
arguments or even the formal parameter names into account for message to
method mapping will complicate the language implementation. This is also
the reason why Ruby does not support multiple dispatch at the language
level. Common-Lisp does support multiple dispatch, but it does so by
including a type modifier to the arguments so that they can be checked
against the actual runtime type of arguments, which, IMO, is as 
unpleasant as doing something like the following in a single method 
definition:

case arg
when String
    # ...
when Symbol
    # ...
end

Like Anurag said, Ruby already has a flexible argument processing
ability; it suffices our needs though in a different style.

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