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In computer programming, especially object-oriented programming, a method is commonly identified by its unique method signature, which usually includes the method name, and the number, types and order of its parameters. A method signature is the smallest type of a method. The signature tag should not be used to tag questions about digital signatures, email signatures or written signatures.

Method signature

In computer programming, especially object-oriented programming, a method is commonly identified by its unique method signature, which usually includes the method name, and the number, types and order of its parameters. A method signature is the smallest type of a method.

Method overloading

Method signatures can be used by the compiler to distinguish between methods with the same name, but with different parameters. This is called method overloading. The precise characteristics of method overloading depends on the programming language. Overloading should not be used for methods that perform an different operation as that will make the source code hard to read.

Examples

Example of declarations of two overloaded methods with the same name, but with a different method signature:

void drawPoint(int x, int y);
void drawPoint(Point p);

in this case it is likely that drawPoint(x, y) internally converts x and y into a Point instance. This kind of function is therefore called a convenience method.

Disambiguation

For digital signatures such as RSA or DSA signatures please use digital-signature and/or cryptography. Email may contain an email-signature, PDF documents may contain a digitized written signature. These signatures don't have specialized tags, please use more generic tags such as email and pdf instead.