Pros and Cons of Parameter Overloading

What you are referring to is called overloading and it is very common. Take a look at Capsoft’s xFiles. You may see multiple different flavors of the Init method. It is a powerful way of adding flexibility to a Class. Here’s what the Clarion help says about it:

"Procedure Overloading means allowing multiple PROCEDURE definitions to use the same name. This is one form of polymorphism. In order to allow this each PROCEDURE using a shared name must receive different parameters so the compiler can decide, based on the parameters passed which PROCEDURE to call.

The idea here is to allow more than one procedure of the same name, but with different prototypes, so separate (but usually similar) operations can occur on different data types. From an efficiency viewpoint, Procedure Overloading is much more efficient than coding a single procedure with omittable parameters, for those cases where you may or may not receive multiple parameters."