Overloading on return values

Overloading on return values

It is common to wonder "Why only class names and method argument lists? Why not distinguish between methods based on their return values?" For example, these two methods, which have the same name and arguments, are easily distinguished from each other:

This works fine when the compiler can unequivocally determine the meaning from the context, as in int x = f( ). However, you can call a method and ignore the return value; this is often referred to as calling a method for its side effect since you don't care about the return value but instead want the other effects of the method call. So if you call the method this way:

how can Java determine which f( ) should be called? And how could someone reading the code see it? Because of this sort of problem, you cannot use return value types to distinguish overloaded methods.