Jump to content

Generic function

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Michael Hardy (talk | contribs) at 22:04, 3 March 2003 (The first sentence was written like a dictionary entry and was not actually a sentence, and did not have the word highlighted, nor used at all.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

In certain systems for object-oriented programming such as the Common Lisp Object System and Dylan, a generic function is an entity made up of all methods having the same name. Generic functions correspond roughly to what Smalltalk calls messages; but when a generic function is called, method dispatch occurs on the basis of all arguments, not just a single privileged one. See under multiple dispatch for more.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Generic_function&oldid=2015307"