Overloading vs Overriding, what is the difference and what is the purpose?
To understand the difference between overloading vs. overriding, it’s first necessary to define these terms.
- Overloading occurs when two or more methods in a class have the same name but different parameters. This allows for other behavior depending on what the method is called. For example, a class might have two overloaded “move” methods. One move version might need two parameters for the x and y coordinates to move, while another might take one parameter for the amount to move in a specific direction.
- Overriding occurs when a child class inherits a method from a parent class but provides its implementation of that method. The purpose of this is to change the behavior of the inherited method. For example, a child class might override the move method from its parent to provide different behavior.
It’s kind of hard to do this without examples, so here is a youtube video from Alex Lee that breaks down with a few great, simple examples, what overriding in Java does. He also has one on overloading