Sorta? The function does return a union type, in isolation. At most callsites, you would know which of the two you are getting. This is much closer to generic invocation, if I remember the name correctly. Was very common in a lot of older dynamic languages.

In fact, in a lot of languages, you can't tell this is a float, statically. It would work with whatever type was passed in that supports multiplication. And return the appropriate type. Right?