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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

> From my perspective, Go added methods primarily so that you can use them in combination with interfaces.

They also give you a limited form of overloading. Without methods or overloading, you end up in the situation that C and Scheme are in where every operation on a data structure has to redundantly have the data structure in its name like:

    list_clear(my_list);
    queue_clear(my_queue);
    map_clear(my_map);

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In Go you would methods for that: my_list.Clear(), my_queue.Clear() and my_map.Clear(). Now you can define a Clearer interface, which has only the Clear method. That allows you to write a function clearAndLog(item Clearer) and it will work with the list, queue and map.

Yes, that's my point.

Go doesn't have overloading by parameter list signature. But you can have methods with the same name defined on different types, so there is a sort of overloading or namespacing based on the receiver type. Methods give you that.

I just want to leave this here:

SICP: 2.5 Systems with Generic Operations

https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e5.xhtml

> Without methods or overloading, you end up in the situation that C and Scheme are in

Well in C at least we now have this:

  #define clear(s) _Generic((s) \
          ,struct list: list_clear \
          ,struct queue: queue_clear \
          ,struct map: map_clear \
  )(s)

  clear(my_map);
  clear(my_list);
  clear(my_queue);

...although it turns out the other nice thing about methods is automatic namespacing.

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