Polymorphism vs Overriding vs Overloading

Question

In terms of Java, when someone asks:

what is polymorphism?

Would overloading or overriding be

Answer 1

Neither:

Overloading is when you have the same function name that takes different parameters.

Overriding is when a child class replaces a parent's method with one of its own (this in iteself does not constitute polymorphism).

Polymorphism is late binding, e.g. the base class (parent) methods are being called but not until runtime does the application know what the actual object is - it may be a child class whose methods are different. This is because any child class can be used where a base class is defined.

In Java you see polymorphism a lot with the collections library:

int countStuff(List stuff) {
  return stuff.size();
}

List is the base class, the compiler has no clue if you're counting a linked list, vector, array, or a custom list implementation, as long as it acts like a List:

List myStuff = new MyTotallyAwesomeList();
int result = countStuff(myStuff);

If you were overloading you'd have:

int countStuff(LinkedList stuff) {...}
int countStuff(ArrayList stuff) {...}
int countStuff(MyTotallyAwesomeList stuff) {...}
etc...

and the correct version of countStuff() would be picked by the compiler to match the parameters.