Polymorphism

I have seen this word a few time and each time I though I knew what it was. Well I had no Idea and where I was reading it was articles about programing, object oriented programing in fact. Well I finally looked it up and I found this little helpful definition.

polymorphism

A concept first identified by Christopher Strachey (1967) and developed by Hindley and Milner, allowing types such as list of anything. E.g. in Haskell:

length :: [a] -> Int

is a function which operates on a list of objects of any type, a (a is a type variable). This is known as parametric polymorphism. Polymorphic typing allows strong type checking as well as generic functions. ML in 1976 was the first language with polymorphic typing.

Ad-hoc polymorphism (better described as overloading) is the ability to use the same syntax for objects of different types, e.g. “+” for addition of reals and integers or “-” for unary negation or diadic subtraction. Parametric polymorphism allows the same object code for a function to handle arguments of many types but overloading only reuses syntax and requires different code to handle different types.

See also generic type variable.

In object-oriented programming, the term is used to describe a variable that may refer to objects whose class is not known at compile time and which respond at run time according to the actual class of the object to which they refer.

Well take a look at the last paragraph (of course it’s the last paragraph) is a clear explanation of polymorphism. Boy is this useful but the only thing is I would with Cold Fusion MX and this is nye impossible. Well if any of you actually read this flimsy excuse for a blog can you point me in a direction that will allow me to figure out how to do this in CF? I understand what it means but actually doing it is always the harder of the two.

you can find out more here:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=4&q=polymorphism
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=polymorphism&btnG=Search