Precisely. This may sound pedantic or academic, but in practice when static overloading and dynamic dispatch differ, the static behavior is usually not what you

Precisely. This may sound pedantic or academic, but in practice when static overloading and dynamic dispatch differ, the static behavior is usually not what you want. In my experience, this makes it painful to make code that is polymorphic in multiple arguments behave correctly in C++ (double dispatch [1] is one of the necessary but awkward tactics that's used), whereas multiple dispatch just works. And of course, almost working and actually working are a world apart even though they sound so close. [1] http://lostechies.com/derekgreer/2010/04/19/double-dispatch-is-a-code-smell/ http://lostechies.com/derekgreer/2010/04/19/double-dispatch-...