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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T15:41:45+00:00

There seems to be some debate/disagreement on whether it is possible to ‘overload’ methods

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There seems to be some debate/disagreement on whether it is possible to ‘overload’ methods in Objective-C. Putting aside that it is impossible to define method overloading in Objective-C is terms equal to those of C++ (because of method signature syntax differences), I would ask in particular: Which of the following is allowed and which are not?

1) A class declaring/implementing both these methods:

- (void) doSomethingWithObject:(ClassA*) object;
- (void) doSomethingWithObject:(ClassB*) object;

2) A class declaring/implementing both these methods:

- (void) doSomethingWithObject:(ClassA*) object;
- (BOOL) doSomethingWithObject:(ClassA*) object;

3) A class declaring/implementing this method:

- (void) doSomethingWithObject:(ClassB*) object;

…when its superclass declares/implements this method:

- (void) doSomethingWithObject:(ClassA*) object;

(and the analogue for conflicting return value), both when A) ClassB descends from ClassA, and B) Not.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Question 1: no can do: Objective-C doesn’t include the types in the method names; there is no mangling. It might work with Objective-C++ — never used it that much.

    Question 2: Same. Won’t work.

    Question 3: Will work.

    EDIT: in general, method names do not include any types, so if you strip the types and they are the same then it will be considered the same, and therefore won’t be allowed in the same class. Along the same lines, it WILL work if it’s in different classes, although you might get some confusion if the types used in the call and the types used in what gets called don’t quite agree.

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