[masklinn]

You're stating "you can't differentiate between method implementations based on return type alone" which is nonsensical both on its face (people have no issue doing it) and technically (since several languages do exactly that).

And thus "Java needs to be able to decide which overloaded method implementation to use at compile time" is not an issue relevant to return-type overloading.

There was no issue with Java implementing return-type overloading, the creators of Java decided not to do it for non-technical reasons.

[nebulous1]

Oh, I see. My language may have been imperfect, but I think the meaning is clear. Obviously it's possible to differentiate based on return type, by very definition of it having a different return type, and also that the mentioned bytecode does just that. I see no reason why you would assume that the second half of the sentence was supposed to apply to languages generally when the first half mentions Java specifically. "Java needs to decide if you want a method to be public at compile time, so you can't leave out the public keyword and expect it to be public". Not true, says you, they could have made public methods the default.

Anyway, I think we understand each other now, and I shall endeavor to be clearer in the future.