Chapter 3, Problem 20E

Explanation of Solution

Example for overloading:

Consider a function to return the lesser of two floating point arguments:

//function definition

double min (double x, double y)

{

    //statement

}

• Here, if the function is called in a context which expects an integer (that is, i = min (j, k)), then the compiler will coerce the integer arguments (j and k) to floating-point numbers, call “min”, and then coerce the result back to an integer.
• While the result may be numerically correct, so it won’t be very fast.
• An overloaded integer-specific version of “min” would use integer arithmetic for the comparison, and would avoid three conversion operations.

Example of coercion:

On the other side, consider the following function that uses Heron’s formula to compute the area of a triangle with sides of length “aa&#...