Double dispatch

In software engineering, double dispatch is a special form of multiple dispatch, and a mechanism that dispatches a function call to different concrete functions depending on the runtime types of two objects involved in the call. In most object-oriented systems, the concrete function that is called from a function call in the code depends on the dynamic type of a single object and therefore they are known as single dispatch calls, or simply virtual function calls.

Dan Ingalls first described how to use double dispatching in Smalltalk, calling it multiple polymorphism.