Functional equivalent of overloading?

I'm not sure what you mean by a functional programming language, this seems to have to do with a specific feature of any programming language (e.g. , is overloading supported) rather than whether it is functional or object-oriented. In Javascript, for example, it is not supported, but is easily simulated because javascript doesn't require parameters to be passed and isn't strongly typed a: array or integer // b: optional integer when a is integer function LowestCommonMultiple(a, b) { // could also test for presence of b, other validation checking probably good if (a instanceof Array) { // array code } else { return (a * b) / GreatestCommonFactor(a, b); // details ommited } } The answer is going to be depend on the specific features of the language in question.

I'm not sure what you mean by a functional programming language, this seems to have to do with a specific feature of any programming language (e.g. , is overloading supported) rather than whether it is functional or object-oriented. In Javascript, for example, it is not supported, but is easily simulated because javascript doesn't require parameters to be passed and isn't strongly typed. // a: array or integer // b: optional integer when a is integer function LowestCommonMultiple(a, b) { // could also test for presence of b, other validation checking probably good if (a instanceof Array) { // array code } else { return (a * b) / GreatestCommonFactor(a, b); // details ommited } } The answer is going to be depend on the specific features of the language in question.

I don't think that your problem has much to do with functional vs procedural/OO programing but with static vs dynamic variable typing. Take SML (a dialect of ML) and Scheme/Lisp for instance. Both functional languages, but it's a no brainer to overload a function in SML while it's impossible in Scheme (at least so it was when I was still using it).

SML is statically typed (like C/C++/JAVA etc. ) and therefore it's not problem for the compiler to use the variable types as a part of the signature and create overloads just like you any C compiler would create them for C code. Scheme on the other hand is dynamically typed and therefore the compiler/interpreter can't figure out a signature for the method based on it's parameters at compile time (in most cases). Your question is very language pacific (I don't even think that all statically typed languages support function/method overloading) so it'll always come down to what language (and sometimes implementation) are you using.

In Haskell, overloading is done using type classes. This is quite different from overloading in C#, as type classes are more similar to interfaces in C#, although they are also more powerful*. For example, to have a function which will be able to accept either an Integer or a Bool, you can write something like this: class Foo a where foo :: a -> String instance Foo Integer where foo n = show (n+42) instance Foo Bool where foo be = if be then "" else "Goodbye" Testing this out in the interpreter, we see that the function foo has a type with constraints.

*Main> :t foo foo :: Foo a => a -> String This means that the function will work for types a for which we have defined a Foo instance. *Main> foo 1295 "1337" *Main> foo False "Goodbye" If we attempt to use it on a type for which there is no such instance, we get an error. *Main> foo "" :1:1: No instance for (Foo Char) arising from a use of `foo' Possible fix: add an instance declaration for (Foo Char) In the expression: foo "" In an equation for `it': it = foo " I don't think it's very useful to overload this function in such a way in Haskell.In fact, the lcm function in the standard library is already overloaded.

*Main> :t lcm lcm :: Integral a => a -> a -> a This means that it will work on any type for which there is an Integral instance. In this case, that's all integer-like types, including the machine-sized Int, the arbitrary-size Integer, and others such as Int32, Int64 and so on. The list version can be written as foldl1' lcm, so there might not be much of a need to provide such an overload in the first place.

* For one thing, type class instances are passed separately from the objects they apply to. This makes things like multiple dispatch a lot cleaner. This also means you can overload on the return type of a function, which would be impossible in C#.

Type classes can also be used with type constructors; Monad is perhaps the most famous example of such a type class.

You can write any count of signatures with one restruction - you can't have 2 signatures with equal parameter types. Every signature can have it's ow return type void SomeMethor(){...} string SomeMethod(string s){...} object SomeMethod(string s, int i){...}.

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