How to prevent a method from overloading in Java?

Question

Overriding a method can be prevented by using the keyword final, likewise how to prevent overloading?

Answer 1

You can't. Because it's almost pointless.

If you want to overload the method handle(..) but you are disallowed to, you'd create doHandle(..) instead.

Which overloaded method is used is determined at compile time (in contrast to overridden methods, which are determined at runtime). So the point of overloading is sharing a common name for common operations. Disallowing that is a matter of code-style, rather than anything else.

Answer 2

You can't do that in Java.

An overloaded method is basically just another method.

An attempt could look (something) like this

void yourMethod(String arg) { /* ... */ }

void yourMethod(String arg, Object... prevent) {
    throw new IllegalArgumentException();
}

but it won't work since Java resolves overloading by looking at the "best match" or "most specific signature".

The method could still be overloaded with a

void yourMethod(String arg, String arg2) { /* ... */ }

which would be called when doing yourMethod("hello", "world").

Btw, why would you want to prevent overloading? Perhaps there is another way of doing what you want?