Polymorphism in Object-Oriented Programming

In Greek, "poly" means "many". For example, polygon means a many sided shape. Also in Greek, "morph" means "form". Morphology is the study of how words are "formed". Thus, polymorphism means "many forms".

In Computer Science, and particularly in Object-Oriented Programming, polymorphism refers to presenting the same interface for differing underlying forms (data types).

Polymorphism with Shapes

An example of Polymorphism is a Shape class and all the classes that can inherit from this Shape class - classes like Point, Square, Circle, Rectangle, etc.

Polymorphism allows each of these classes to have different underlying data even though they inherit from the Shape class. A Point shape only needs two co-ordinates as data. A Circle shape needs a center and radius as data. Square and Rectangle shapes need four co-ordinates as data for the corners. Each of these shape classes will have different functionality while sharing a common interface.

Each class would have its own draw() function that can be invoked on a shape object by doing circle.draw() or rectangle.draw() to get the right draw behavior for each type of shape.

polymorphism makes applications more modular. It saves us from having to create functions like drawRectangle() and drawCircle() all in one class. It also saves us from having many conditional statements in one draw() function describing different behaviors per shape.

Polymorphism with Vehicles

Another example is that of a Vehicle class with a wheels property. A Bicycle class can inherit from the Vehicle class and override wheels to be 2. A Car class can inherit from the Vehicle class and override wheels to be 4. Each subclass is responsible for knowing how many wheels it has. The base class Vehicle does not know about how many wheels its sub-classes have.

The Car and Bicycle classes are both of type Vehicle, which means that we can add objects of both to an array/list of type Vehicle. Then, we can loop over this array/list and treat each object the same way by referencing it's wheels property. When we do reference each vehicle's wheels property, the Vehicle class will delegate that reference to it's corresponding sub-class.

The code that will be executed will be determined by the actual sub-class of the object being referenced at runtime, whether it's a Car or a Bicycle object.