What characteristics distinguish mechanisms of dynamic dispatching in programming systems?

Dynamic dispatch is a mechanism where the method call is determined at runtime rather than at compile time. Key features:

• Late Binding: The specific implementation of a method is chosen during execution, allowing for polymorphism.
• Support for inheritance and overriding: Objects can have different implementations of the same method.
• Use of virtual function tables (vtable): For quick lookup of the required method.
• Flexibility and extensibility: Allows adding new classes and methods without modifying existing code.

In iOS (Objective-C), dynamic dispatch is implemented through message passing, where a method call is turned into sending a message to an object, which at runtime decides which method to execute.