Question about overriding and overload

Question

Below is a super class named Animal and subclass named Horse
public class Animal {
public void eat() {
System.out.println("Generic Animal Eating Generically");
public class Horse extends Animal {
public void eat() {
System.out.println("Horse eating hay ");
public void eat(String s) {
System.out.println("Horse eating " + s);
public class Test {
public static void main ( strin []agrs) {
Animal ah2 = new Horse();
ah2.eat("Carrots");
At the bold line, why can not polymorphism work here.
Can anyone explain it to me pls.
Thanks

Answer 1

800239 wrote:
Below is a super class named Animal and subclass named Horse
public class Animal {
public void eat() {
System.out.println("Generic Animal Eating Generically");
public class Horse extends Animal {
public void eat() {
System.out.println("Horse eating hay ");
public void eat(String s) {
System.out.println("Horse eating " + s);
public class Test {
public static void main ( strin []agrs) {
Animal ah2 = new Horse();
*ah2.eat("Carrots");*
}At the bold line, why can not polymorphism work here.
Can anyone explain it to me pls.
ThanksThe variable ah2 is declared as a reference of type Animal. That means we can only call methods that exist and are accessible in Animal. The compiler doesn't know or care that at runtime the Animal reference variable points to a Horse object. All that it sees is that ah2 is of type Animal.
The kind of polymorphism where that does matter is when a child class overrides (not overloads) a non-static, non-final, non-private parent method with the exact same signature.