# Julia's equivalent to Fortran elemental functions
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julias-equivalent-to-fortran-elemental-functions/2576
**Category:** General Usage
**Created:** [March 9, 2017, 8:07pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julias-equivalent-to-fortran-elemental-functions/2576 "2017-03-09T20:07:10Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@PieterjanRobbe](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/PieterjanRobbe)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2017, 8:07pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julias-equivalent-to-fortran-elemental-functions/2576/1 "2017-03-09T20:07:10Z")
Fortran has [elemental functions](http://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/elemental).
This means that you can define a function for _primitive_ types (int, double…) and they will automatically work for vectors and matrices that contain these primitive types.
Consider the _elemental_ function `pos(x::Number) = x < 0 ? zero(x) : x`
This is the closest I get using Julia:
```julia
pos(x) = reshape([pos(x[i]) for i = 1:length(x)],size(x))
```
Now `pos` works for scalars of type `Number`, vectors, matrices, ranges…
Are there alternatives?
---
### Author:  [@jw3126](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jw3126)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2017, 8:18pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julias-equivalent-to-fortran-elemental-functions/2576/2 "2017-03-09T20:18:36Z")
You can vectorize any function by adding a dot:
```julia
pos.(my_array)
```
---
### Author:  [@simonbyrne](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/simonbyrne)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2017, 8:19pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julias-equivalent-to-fortran-elemental-functions/2576/3 "2017-03-09T20:19:35Z")
In 0.5 and later, this is exactly what `.` broadcasting is for:
```julia
julia> pos(x::Number) = x < 0 ? zero(x) : x
pos (generic function with 1 method)
julia> pos.(randn(10))
10-element Array{Float64,1}:
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.455044
0.0
0.639169
0.636522
1.07678
```
See [Steven G. Johnson’s excellent blog post](http://julialang.org/blog/2017/01/moredots) for more details.
---
### Author:  [@PieterjanRobbe](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/PieterjanRobbe)
#### Post date: [March 9, 2017, 8:50pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julias-equivalent-to-fortran-elemental-functions/2576/4 "2017-03-09T20:50:43Z")
Simply amazing.
Thanks!