in programming generally, is it common to write a ...

# getting-started

[oday]

in programming generally, is it common to write a function that can accept more than 1 type of object?

[Vladyslav Sitalo]

that’s kind of odd question 😛. But to answer it - yes it’s fairly common

[Andreas Sinz]

In what way? for example a String or an Int?

[oday]

hmm yea any type

[oday]

fun (T)

[karelpeeters]

println takes a bunch of stuff, StringBuffer.append takes `CharSequence`s and characters.

[oday]

sorry sorry, objects of different types

[karelpeeters]

Ah. Is listOf more like what you mean?

[oday]

while accessing them inside as well, remember when you helped me with this before @karelpeeters? and how you passed lambdas for the cases where you wanted access to those differnt objects?

[oday]

they have different properties, there’s no way i think to do this without accepting a lambda

[oday]

where at call-time you pass what you want to end up doing with that object

[karelpeeters]

I vaguely remember that simple smile . It's called "ad-hoc polymorphism", see http://beust.com/weblog/2016/06/20/ad-hoc-polymorphism-in-kotlin/

[karelpeeters]

Preferred way would of course be actual polymorphism.

[oday]

you linked to that as well back then 😛

[oday]

but I dont see in smaller cases where that’s needed, I mean you can just pass a function that does the property access for you

[oday]

propertyNeededInsideFunction = getPropertyForThisObject.invoke()

[oday]

and the lambda is {objectTypeA.property}

[karelpeeters]

I don't really get your question now - there's 3 ways to do this: overloading, ad-hoc and actual polymorphism. Each of them has their own use cases, and all of them are used.

[oday]

yea I’ll read up on these, cause I forgot the gist of it back then when I first understood it

[oday]

just took it on implementation-basis, didn’t read reasoning