efranford

 Profile Answers by efranford 

• Aug 11th, 2008

 

Function templates involve telling a function that it will be receiving a specified data type and then it will work with that at compile time.

The difference with this and function overloading is that function overloading can define multiple behaviors of function with the same name and multiple/various inputs.

eg:
Function Template

template<Class T>
void print(T var)
{
 cout << var;
}

The template T is basically passing an instance of a specified "Class" T into the function to work with.  With this you can really only use one Template and other inputs.  It is possible to overload a functions template.

Functoin Overloading
string ToString()
{
  return this;
}

string ToString(string)
{
  return this + string;
}

Notice how the second example is overloaded to allow the same name to be used while attaining a different response.

sureshds

 Profile Answers by sureshds 

• Dec 26th, 2009

 

In both cases function name is same.

But, during function overloading, the function signature is different. Signature is like type of arguments, number of arguments and orderof arguments.

For templates the signature is same and ready to accept any kind of data. There is no restriction on type of data.

prabhuvinoth

 Profile Answers by prabhuvinoth 

• Jun 29th, 2010

 

Function templates makes the function to performs the same task for different data type.

Function overloading makes the function to performs different task for different parameters you are passing.