Polymorphism 1.3 2004/06/18 11:33:26 GMT-5 2007/07/19 10:03:37.529 GMT-5 National Instruments certification@ni.com National Instruments certification@ni.com Elizabeth Gregory elizabeth.gregory@gmail.com Malan Shiralkar mshiralkar05@hotmail.com Harika Basana ilsai@rice.edu LabVIEW National Instruments Polymorphism polymorphism In this section, you will learn about Polymorphism. The Numeric functions located on the Functions>>Express Numeric and Functions>>All Functions>>Numeric palettes are polymorphic. This means that the inputs to these functions can be different data structures, such as scalar values and arrays. For example, you can use the Add function to add a scalar value to an array or to add two arrays together. If you wire a scalar value of 2 and the following array to the Add function. 1 3 2 The function adds the scalar value to each element of the array and returns the following array: 3 5 4 If you wire the previous two arrays to the Add function, the function adds each element of one array to the corresponding element of the other array and returns the following array: 4 8 6 Wire two arrays of different sizes to the Add function, such as the previous array and the following array: 3 1 2 3 The function adds corresponding elements and returns the following array, which is the size of the smaller input array: 7 9 8 You use the Numeric functions with clusters the same way you use them with arrays of numeric values. Refer to Clusters for more information about clusters.