Perl Programming Question:
Why does Perl not have overloaded functions?
Answer:
Because you can inspect the argument count, return context, and object types all by yourself.
In Perl, the number of arguments is trivially available to a function via the scalar sense of @_, the return context via wantarray(), and the types of the arguments via ref() if they're references and simple pattern matching like /^d+$/ otherwise. In languages like C++ where you can't do this, you simply must resort to overloading of functions.
In Perl, the number of arguments is trivially available to a function via the scalar sense of @_, the return context via wantarray(), and the types of the arguments via ref() if they're references and simple pattern matching like /^d+$/ otherwise. In languages like C++ where you can't do this, you simply must resort to overloading of functions.
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