Why dont languages allow overloading of methods by return value?

Question

c, java and many other languages do not pay attention to return values.

int   i = func()
float f = func()
int   func() { return 5 }
float func() { return 1.3         


        

Answer 1

Most languages allow for mixed-mode operations with automatic coercion (e.g. float + int), where multiple interpretations are legal. Without coercion, working with multiple numeric types (short, int, long, float, double) would become very cumbersome; with coercion, return-type based disambigation would lead to hard-to-understand code.