Editing Name binding (section)

==Binding time==
* ''Static binding'' (or ''early binding'') is name binding performed before the program is run.<ref name=ieee24765:2010(E)>{{Citation |title=Systems and software engineering — Vocabulary ISO/IEC/IEEE 24765:2010(E)|publisher=IEEE |date=Dec 15, 2010}}</ref>
* ''Dynamic binding'' (or ''[[late binding]]'' or ''virtual binding'') is name binding performed as the program is running.<ref name=ieee24765:2010(E) />

An example of a static binding is a direct [[C (programming language)|C]] function call: the function referenced by the identifier cannot change at runtime.

An example of dynamic binding is [[dynamic dispatch]], as in a [[C++]] virtual method call. Since the specific type of a [[Polymorphism (computer science)|polymorphic]] object is not known before runtime (in general), the executed function is dynamically bound. Take, for example, the following [[Java (programming language)|Java]] code:

<syntaxhighlight lang="java">
public void foo(java.util.List<String> list) {
    list.add("bar");
}
</syntaxhighlight>

<code>List</code> is an [[interface (computing)|interface]], so <code>list</code> must refer to a [[Subtyping|subtype]] of it. <code>list</code> may reference a <code>LinkedList</code>, an <code>ArrayList</code>, or some other [[Subtyping|subtype]] of <code>List</code>. The method referenced by <code>add</code> is not known until runtime. In C, which does not have dynamic binding, a similar goal may be achieved by a call to a function pointed to by a variable or expression of a [[function pointer]] type, whose value is unknown until it is evaluated at run-time.