Ruby does not support method overloading due to its design as a dynamically typed language. In statically typed languages, method overloading is used to create multiple methods with the same name but different parameter types or numbers. This is feasible because the method to be executed can be determined at compile time based on the method signature.
However, Ruby uses dynamic typing and late binding, meaning that types are not checked until runtime. This characteristic of Ruby makes traditional method overloading impractical. If Ruby were to allow method overloading in the traditional sense, it would need to determine which method to call at runtime, considering all the possible methods with the same name but different parameters. This would complicate the method lookup process and could potentially lead to ambiguous situations where it's unclear which method should be invoked.
Instead of method overloading, Ruby handles similar cases using different techniques:
Default parameters: Ruby allows methods to have default values for parameters, which provides some flexibility similar to having overloaded methods.
Variable arguments: Ruby methods can accept variable numbers of arguments, allowing a single method to handle different numbers of inputs.
Keyword arguments: Introduced in Ruby 2.0, keyword arguments allow methods to be called with a clear specification of what each argument represents, similar to named parameters in other languages.
