Hi!
I am really really sorry for the ambiguous response, I meant, overrided* ;
This further supports my notion of a just in time compiler for such cases
of overriding.
I am really really sorry for using the word overloading instead of
overriding, and my example did take enum_t as template argument and a enum
of that arg as function arguments.


On Wed, 1 Apr 2026, 8:41 am Jason McKesson via Std-Proposals, <
std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 9:23 PM Muneem via Std-Proposals
> <std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >
> > Responding to Mr. Jason McKesson's near and dear feedback dated
> [31-3-2026] (I had some issues with my digest settings, so I'm replying
> manually):
> >
> > First, I would like to clarify that the reason I responded late was
> because I couldn't find his mail until someone was kind enough to remind me
> that your (McKesson's) response did, in fact, exist.
> >
> > I did think of that; in fact, that's the main reason why I couldn't
> sleep, to be honest with you. Let me break it down on why I didn't use the
> suggested technique:
> >
> > It can't technically work the way you would expect, since functions can
> be overloaded based on enums, and if it can't be overloaded, then it can't
> have different return types. Why does this matter? Well, the STL containers
> don't share a common container base, so making this work would require you
> to add a base class with virtual functions like pop_back(), at(), etc. Then
> you would have to implement them for each derived class and then return the
> appropriate derived class.
>
> Maybe your example was missing something, but taking it as it was
> presented, the enum in question was a template parameter. And a class
> template parameter at that (since it was clearly *not* a function
> parameter, nor was there a template header). The "overloading" happens
> via template instantiation. Since template parameters are constant
> expressions, you can have them return different types based on the
> result of constant expression evaluation. As long as you use `if
> constexpr` rather than `switch`, that is.
> --
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