OOP: Polymorphism (Definitions)

"Literally, from the Greek for many forms, and refers to the ability of different objects to respond differently to the same commands." (Greg Perry, "Sams Teach Yourself Beginning Programming in 24 Hours" 2nd Ed., 2001)

"The ability to treat many sub-types as if they were of the same base type." (Jesse Liberty, "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" 3rd Ed., 2001)

"The capability of objects from different classes to accept the same message." (Stephen G Kochan, "Programming in Objective-C", 2003)

"The concept that two or more classes of objects can respond to the same message in different ways, using polymorphic operations. Also, the ability to define polymorphic operations." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"In object-oriented design, the principle that the same definition can be used with different types of data (specifically, different class implementations), resulting in more general and abstract implementations." (David C Hay, "Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map", 2010)

"The redefinition of the body of a superclass method inherited by a subclass. The polymorphic method retains the same signature." (Jan L Harrington, "SQL Clearly Explained" 3rd Ed., 2010)

"The ability of a piece of code to work with more than one type." (Mark C Lewis, "Introduction to the Art of Programming Using Scala", 2012)

"The notion that you can tell an object to do something generic, and the object will interpret the command in different ways depending on its type." (Jon Orwant et al, "Programming Perl, 4th Ed.", 2012)

"The ability of a language to determine at runtime which of several possible methods will be executed for a given invocation" (Nell Dale & John Lewis, "Computer Science Illuminated" 6th Ed., 2015)

"The ability to treat a child object as if it were actually from a parent class. For example, it lets you treat a Student object as if it were a Person object because a Student is a type of Person." (Rod Stephens, "Beginning Software Engineering", 2015)

"Two objects can receive the same input and have different outputs." (Adam Gordon, "Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK" 4th Ed., 2015)

"The ability of an object variable to reference objects of different classes at different times during the execution of a program" (Nell Dale et al, "Object-Oriented Data Structures Using Java" 4th Ed., 2016)

"One of the fundamental principles of an object-oriented language. Polymorphism states that a type that extends another type is a “kind of” the parent type and can be used interchangeably with the original type by augmenting or refining its capabilities." (Daniel Leuck et al, "Learning Java" 5th Ed., 2020)