> With the exception of certain artificial contests (Paul Graham) I've never
> met a real world problem that needed overloading, or even benefitted
> signifigantly from overloading that didn't benefit just as much or more
> from one of the solutions above.

I would mention ad-hoc, interactive, engineering computing, e.g., NML,
Mathematica, MatLab, where generic functions and overloading are extremely
useful. But none of these languages can produce safe code, and I would never
recommend using any of them for production releases of software. OCaml =
strong safety. NML and others = fast interactive exploratory programming,
but not safe.

David McClain
Senior Corporate Scientist
Avisere, Inc.

+1.520.390.7738 (USA)
david.mcclain@avisere.com