Valentin David. Overloading in Tiger. CSI Seminar May 2003

Most of the languages used that support the overloading of functions, does not use the type of the returned value in the function signatures. The fact of this is that these technics bring many ambiguities to resolve and some of them are unresolvables. There some other languages like ADA that can resolve it but just on methods (and operators).

One the aim is to try to look for methods so as to resolve the most of this ambiguities. Another is to try to extends overloading on others kind of language elements, just like variables.

But the main aim is to treat overloading as a sugar and and use source to source program transformation technics, with tools like stratego.

As the Andrew Appel's language (Tiger) is a good language for experimentations and it does not contain any overloading, this language is used for applications.

• david0503_tiger-overload_slides.pdf