Object-Oriented Design - Java Software Solutions: Foundations of Program Design - page 343

SELF-REVIEW QUESTIONS (see answers in Appendix N)
SR 7.18 What is method decomposition?
SR 7.19 Answer the following questions about the PigLatinTranslator class.

a. No constructor is defined. Why not?
b. Some of the defined methods are private. Why?
c. A Scanner object is declared in the translate method. What is it
used to scan?

SR 7.20 Identify the resultant sequence of calls/returns of PigLatinTranslator
support methods when translate is invoked with the following actual
parameters.

a. "animal"
b. "hello"
c. "We are the champions"

SR 7.21 How are objects passed as parameters?

7.8 Method Overloading

As we've discussed, when a method is invoked, the flow of control transfers to the
code that defines the method. After the method has been executed, control returns
to the location of the call, and processing continues.
Often the method name is sufficient to indicate which method is being called
by a specific invocation. But in Java, as in other object-oriented languages, you
can use the same method name with different parameter lists for multiple meth-
ods. This technique is called method overloading. It is useful when you need to
perform similar methods on different types of data.
The compiler must still be able to associate each invocation to a
specific method declaration. If the method name for two or more meth-
ods is the same, additional information is used to uniquely identify the
version that is being invoked. In Java, a method name can be used for
multiple methods as long as the number of parameters, the types of
those parameters, and/or the order of the types of parameters is distinct.
For example, we could declare a method called sum as follows:

KEY CONCEPT
The versions of an overloaded
method are distinguished by the
number, type, and order of their
parameters.

public int sum ( int num1, int num2)
{
return num1 + num2;
}