Discussion: Function / Class overloading

[seansd-zz]

This is touched on very briefly in the spec, but how would one deal with a named function or class method having 2 or more overloaded implementations in terms of discovery.

For example:

(function() {
    var Point2D_addXY;

    class Point2D {
        constructor(x:number, y:number) {
            this._x = x;
            this._y = y;
        }
        
        constructor(x:number) {
            this._x = x;
            this._y = 0;
        }
        
        addXY() {
            if (this && (this instanceof Point2D) && this.addXY === Point2D_addXY) {
                return this._x + this._y;
            }
        }
        
        addXY(moreX:number) {
            if (this && (this instanceof Point2D) && this.addXY === Point2D_addXY) {
                return this._x + moreX + this._y;
            }
        }
        
        addXY(moreX:number, moreY:number) {
            if (this && (this instanceof Point2D) && this.addXY === Point2D_addXY) {
                return this._x + moreX + this._y + moreY;
            }
        }
        
    }
    Point2D_addXY = Point2D.prototype.addXY; /* which one is it? */
    return Point2D    
})();

While a bit unorthodox, the addXY methods above are ensuring that the given object that is being used as this this pointer has not some how overwritten the method. . .

But the point is what would Point2D_addXYs value be. . . how do you address this problem? My first thought is that you could overload class methods, and that they just get a wrapper around them by the engine. . .

I suppose you could do the same thing (a wrapper) for functions that are written multiple times with different arg signatures

But in either case how would you change / swap one of those. . . wrapper dosesn't solve that. ..

Discuss. . .