1Occurring in several different forms, in particular with reference to species or genetic variation.
‘polymorphic fish species’
‘polymorphic viruses can mutate to make identification difficult’
‘The adjacent nucleotide was observed to be polymorphic.’
‘The amino acid glycine has three polymorphic variations.’
‘In chimpanzees, six different polymorphic sites were identified.’
‘Genotyping of the four polymorphic markers identified two distinct haplotypes in all of the 23 individuals analysed.’
‘The polymorphic patterns among the samples revealed genetic variations.’
‘Like many other innate immunity genes studied to date, this is highly polymorphic.’
‘None of the fixation indices for polymorphic loci in either species were significantly negative.’
‘These plants maintained the polymorphic condition, even at high light.’
‘Because the model chocolate contains no crystalline sucrose, the researchers were able to see clearly the changing polymorphic forms of the cocoa butter.’
‘A perennial herb found largely in Europe and the Mediterranean, it is an extremely polymorphic species.’
1.1Computing (of a feature of a programming language) allowing routines to use variables of different types at different times.
‘useful polymorphic functions’
‘The long PDF explaining their "polymorphic cipher theory" is, unfortunately, no longer available.’
‘We should write our libraries to have super-clean functional interfaces and make them as polymorphic as reasonable.’
‘The new version is polymorphic, meaning it changes its appearance in an attempt to avoid detection.’
‘It carries a highly destructive payload, and also has some rudimentary polymorphic properties.’
‘It has polymorphic attributes, and its behaviour is determined on the set of installed components.’
‘Malware has moved away from the use of complex polymorphic engines.’
‘They reckon they can prevent copying with their 'multi-randomized, polymorphic quantum physics encoding approach to digital protection'.’
‘The techniques they describe include polymorphic inline cache and regular expression improvements.’
‘This could allow the bad guys to more easily run more complex polymorphic and encryption routines.’
‘A polymorphic batch file appears to be a holy grail to some virus writers, perhaps because of how insanely difficult it is to produce one.’
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