18.6. Overloading Function Templates

Function templates and overloading are intimately related. In Section 6.18, you learned that when overloaded functions perform identical operations on different types of data, they can be expressed more compactly and conveniently using function templates. You can then write function calls with different types of arguments and let the compiler generate separate function-template specializations to handle each function call appropriately. The function-template specializations generated from a given function template all have the same name, so the compiler uses overload resolution to invoke the proper function.

You may also overload function templates. For example, you can provide other function templates that specify the same function name but different function parameters. A function template also can be overloaded by providing nontemplate functions with the same function name but different function parameters.