What's the difference between Polymorphism and Multiple Dispatch?

Question

...or are they the same thing? I notice that each has its own Wikipedia entry: Polymorphism, Multiple Dispatch, but I\'m having trouble seeing how the concepts differ.

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Answer 1

Multiple Dispatch relies on polymorphism based. Typical polymorphism encountered in C++, C#, VB.NET, etc... uses single dispatch -- i.e. the function that gets called only depends on a single class instance. Multiple dispatch relies on multiple class instances.