CSIS 110 – Lecture 31
Programming Assignment
The next programming assignment is on the course web site. It's due in 2 weeks.
Method Overloading
Let's say that I have a method that returns the larger value of two doubles:
public double max( double a, double b ) {
if ( a > b )
return a;
else
return b;
}
Now, I can use this method with 2 doubles:
double first = stdin.nextDouble();
double second = stdin.nextDouble();
double larger = max( first, second );
I can also do this:
int first = stdin.nextInt();
int second = stdin.nextInt();
double larger = max( first, second );
This is OK, but not really that great. I could change the last statement to be:
int larger = (int) max( first, second );
This is still not so great - does a lot of unecessary work converting ints to doubles and
back again. I'd really like this:
int first = stdin.nextInt();
int second = stdin.nextInt();
int larger = max( first, second );
Java allows me to do this by defining a second method with the same name!
public int max( int a, int b ) {
if ( a > b )
return a;
else
return b;
