An alternative to function overloading

Method overloading has always struck me as a bit clunky. It separates a method’s main code from helper code, adds clutter, and doesn’t play nicely with inheritance (at least in Java). On the other hand, its ability to provide variants for a given method is useful. I think Effes provides a better alternative.

Overloads provide two axes by which you can create variants of a method: they let you omit arguments by supplying a reasonable default, and they let you pass in a value whose type is similar to (but different from) the “main” type. For instance, you can imagine a method add(double n, RoundingMode mode) with an overload add(long n). That second overload would call the first variant, casting the long to double and using RoundingMode.HALF_UP.

Lots of languages let you omit arguments by providing default values: add(n, mode=HALF_UP) or similar. Effes will, too, but it’s tough for a statically typed language to handle the arg-of-similar-type problem. The only thing you can really do is to accept a supertype, like add(Number n). But to do that, you need control over the type hierarchy, which you obviously may not have.

In Effes, you can use disjunctive types instead:

add(n: Double|Long):
  d = case n of
    Double: n
    Long: n toDouble -- e.g., if there's no automatic type promotion
  ...