MULTIPLE DISPATCH AS DISPATCH ON TUPLES

Many popular object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, Small talk-80, Java, and Eiffel, do not support multiple dispatch. Yet witho ut multiple dispatch, programmers find it difficult to express binary methods and design patterns such as the ''visitor'' pattern. We descri be a new, simple, and orthogonal way to add multimethods to single-dis patch object-oriented languages, without affecting existing code. The new mechanism also clarifies many differences between single and multi ple dispatch.