4/24/08

What are the advantages of polymorphism and dynamic binding?

They allow old code to call new code in a substitutable fashion.

The real power of object-oriented programming isn't just inheritance; it's the ability to treat objects of derived classes as if they were objects of the base class. The mechanisms that support this are polymorphism and dynamic binding.

Polymorphism allows an object of a derived class to be passed to a function that accepts a reference or a pointer to a base class. A function that receives such objects is a polymorphic function.

When a polymorphic function invokes a member function using a base class reference or pointer, dynamic binding executes the code from the derived class even though the polymorphic function may be unaware that the derived class exists. The code that is executed depends on the type of the object rather than on the type of the reference or pointer. In this way, objects of a derived class can be substituted for objects of a base class without requiring any changes in the polymorphic functions that use the objects.

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