Polywhatsthatnow? Polymorphism ” is the ability of one type, A, to appear as and be used like another type, B.”
It is a facet of OOP and can best be described using the good ol’ example of the ‘Shape’ class problem (thanks Java!). Let’s suppose we’d like to create an application that drew a number of shapes on a page. At the time of analysis we know that we want to immediately support circles, but to future-proof our application we need to support the drawing of any shapes. Being Pretty Darn Good Developers(tm) we realise we should create a Shape class that has a single method used to draw itself, and any specific shapes should be derived from this class, and override that method. Make sense? Didn’t think so.
