Polymorphism

In the previous section, we mentioned that inheritance is a solution that allows you to change the behavior of code while a program is running. This is because inheritance enables polymorphism in C++.

Polymorphism means many forms and represents the ability of objects to behave in different ways.

We mentioned earlier that templates are a way to write code that works with many different types at compilation time and, depending on the types used to instantiate the template, the behavior will change.

This kind of pattern is called static polymorphism – static because it is known during compilation time. C++ also supports dynamic polymorphism – having the behavior of methods change while the program is running. This is powerful because we can react to information we obtain only after we have compiled our program, such as user input, values in configurations, or the kind of hardware the code is running on. This is possible thanks to two features – dynamic binding and dynamic dispatch...