This is actually a relatively common example of the benefits of either polymorphism (for the a.add(b) version) or generic methods/templates. You'll actually fin

This is actually a relatively common example of the benefits of either polymorphism (for the a.add(b) version) or generic methods/templates. You'll actually find libraries that have a method or template function like this in C++, Java, C#, and other commonly used static languages.