function overloading question

I have a function that takes in a date and returns a date but now my users wants it to take in a varchar2 and return a varchar2. I was wondering if it is a good pratice to do it this way or not. All I did was do a data_type conversion and then passed it to the original function and returned the value. Like so

function A (d in date) return date
is
begin
--date manipulation
return d
end A;

function A (v in varchar2) return varchar2 is
foo date := to_date(v,'yyyymmdd');
begin
return to_char(A(foo), 'yyyymmdd');
end A;

or should I just recreate the entire function instead of making the call to the overloaded function basically twice. this only happens if they want a varchar2 input and output from the function.

Adam Received on Mon Feb 25 2002 - 17:07:32 CET