How to define “type disjunction” (union types)?

Question

One way that has been suggested to deal with double definitions of overloaded methods is to replace overloading with pattern matching:

object Bar {
   def fo         


        

Answer 1

Well, that's all very clever, but I'm pretty sure you know already that the answers to your leading questions are various varieties of "No". Scala handles overloading differently and, it must be admitted, somewhat less elegantly than you describe. Some of that's due to Java interoperability, some of that is due to not wanting to hit edged cases of the type inferencing algorithm, and some of that's due to it simply not being Haskell.