Dynamic dispatch

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In computer science, dynamic dispatch is the process of selecting which implementation of a polymorphic operation (method or function) to call at run time. It is commonly employed in, and considered a prime characteristic of, object-oriented programming (OOP) languages and systems. Object-oriented systems model a problem as a set of interacting objects that enact operations referred to by name. Polymorphism is the phenomenon wherein somewhat interchangeable objects each expose an operation of the same name but possibly differing in behavior. As an example, a File object and a Database object both have a StoreRecord method that can be used to write a personnel record to storage. Their implementations differ. A program holds a reference to an object which may be either a File object or a Database object. Which one it is may have been determined by a run-time setting, and at this stage, the program may not know or care which. When the program calls StoreRecord on the object, something needs...

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