This is probably more of a julia-dev topic, but my gut reaction is that the combination of multiple dispatch and implicit conversion would be chaos. Following method calls can be tricky enough (much easier with Gallium <https://github.com/Keno/Gallium.jl>, however) with just dispatch in the mix. With implicit conversion too, it seems like it would be nearly impossible to know what might or might not be called. I think it would be too easy to accidentally invoke a method that wasn't intended.
On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 9:05 AM, Didier Verna <did...@didierverna.net> wrote: > > This is just an idea from the top of my head, probably wild and maybe > silly. I haven't given it any serious thought. > > Given the existence of the general promotion system (which I like a lot, > along with other things in Julia, such as the functor capabilities), I'm > wondering about automatic specialization. > > What I mean is this: suppose you have a type Foo which can be converted > to an Int. Suppose as well that you have a function bar that only works > on Ints. You cannot currently call bar with a Foo, but since Foo is > convertible to an Int, it could make sense that bar() suddenly becomes > an applicable method, with implicit conversion... > > -- > ELS'16 registration open! http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org > > Lisp, Jazz, Aïkido: http://www.didierverna.info >
