Editing Eiffel (programming language) (section)

===Overloading===
Eiffel does not allow argument [[Method overloading|overloading]]. Each feature name within a class always maps to a specific feature within the class. One name, within one class, means one thing. This design choice helps the readability of classes, by avoiding a cause of ambiguity about which routine will be invoked by a call. It also simplifies the language mechanism; in particular, this is what makes Eiffel's multiple inheritance mechanism possible.<ref>Bertrand Meyer: Overloading vs Object Technology, in Journal of Object-Oriented Programming (JOOP), vol. 14, no. 4, October–November 2001, available [http://se.ethz.ch/~meyer/publications/joop/overloading.pdf online]</ref>

Names can, of course, be reused in different classes. For example, the feature {{mono|plus}} (along with its infix [[#Operator and bracket syntax, assigner commands|alias]] {{mono|"+"}}) is defined in several classes: {{mono|INTEGER}}, {{mono|REAL}}, {{mono|STRING}}, etc.