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Comment by singularity2001 | Hacker News Reader

singularity2001

I tried to convince the julia authors to make a.b(c) synonymous to b(a,c) like in nim (for similar reasons as in the article). They didn't like it.

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I don't like it either, because it promotes method `b` to the global namespace. There may be many such `b` methods on different, unrelated types. I think that the latter should be prefixed with the typename or module name.

   a.b(c) == AType.b(a, c)   (or AType::b(a, c) , C++ style)

It's the other way around: in Julia b are functions which are globally visible by default and I just suggested to optionally hide them or find them via the object a.

What were their reasons?

I suspect:

Julia's multiple dispatch means that all arguments to a function are treated equally. The syntax `b(a, c)` makes this clear, whereas `a.b(c)` makes it look like `a` is in some way special.

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