Comment by listeria

Function overloading enables the building of powerful idioms like swap, operator== and this [1] proposal for composable hashing to name a few. And when combined with templates (and ADL to provide some encapsulation with namespaces) you can build some interesting abstractions akin to the io module in go, like this implementation of io.ReadFull():

    template<typename R>
    constexpr ssize_t
    io::ReadFull(R reader, char *buf, size_t len)
    {
      ssize_t recvd = 0, ret;

      do {
        ret = read(reader, &buf[recvd], len - recvd);
        if (ret > 0)
          recvd += ret;
        else
          break;
      } while (recvd < len);

      return recvd;
    }

---

1: https://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n3980.h...