[sclangdon]

Things such as function overloading, operator overloading, dynamic dispatch, etc, are all conveinient but also obscure what is actually happening.

To take C++ as an example (I love C++ btw, this isn't another C++ bashing), a line as simple as "variable1 = variable2;", could be doing all kinds of things (including not even assigning) because of the ability to overload the asignment operator. As someone reading this line of code for the first time, you don't really know for sure what is actually happening unless you also go and read the code for "=".

[pdw]

Though COBOL infamously has the ALTER statement, which allows you to rewrite code at run time ;)