While the explanation was a little wordy, it really helped me visualize what was happening — particular the image with cross-links, and the two different kinds

While the explanation was a little wordy, it really helped me visualize what was happening — particular the image with cross-links, and the two different kinds of table of contents. Now I see that the essence of the concept relates to the semantics of “categories” (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) -vs- “tags”, especially when there might be multiple ways to split the domain into categories (especially when they fill out an incomplete/sparse subset of the full Cartesian product). Conventional dispatch (presumably implementation in the language?) is based on one of either functions/types as categories, while multiple dispatch uses all of these inputs as tags to specialize on the appropriate implementation. If this perspective is correct, I would like to understand why/how the implementation conventional languages forced them into category-based single dispatch. Thanks for a nice article :-)