# Makie (and Julia) do not automatically typecast obvious numerical representations

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/makie-and-julia-do-not-automatically-typecast-obvious-numerical-representations/75148
**Category:** Visualization
**Tags:** type, makie
**Created:** [January 24, 2022, 10:25pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/makie-and-julia-do-not-automatically-typecast-obvious-numerical-representations/75148 "2022-01-24T22:25:49Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![stevengj](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/stevengj/32/71_2.png) [@stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/stevengj)
#### Post date: [January 24, 2022, 10:30pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/makie-and-julia-do-not-automatically-typecast-obvious-numerical-representations/75148/2 "2022-01-24T22:30:17Z")

</div>

This is pretty fundamental to how dispatch works in Julia and isn’t something that can really be changed. If you write `f(x::Int)`, you are telling the language that you only want this method to be called for `Int` arguments — the argument types act as a kind of filter.

> [@PSA: Julia is not at that stage of development anymore](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/psa-julia-is-not-at-that-stage-of-development-anymore/44872):
>
> You heard about this brand new exciting programming language called Julia and have some suggestions for how it should work. Wonderful! We’re happy to have you here and help you learn the language and listen to your ideas! However, please be aware that “new” is a relative term. Yes, Julia is newer than, say, C, which was first created in 1972 and standardized in 1989. It is not, however, new in the sense that it is still being freely designed and changed in arbitrary ways. Julia development start…

Definitely library authors should try to accept the widest applicable type signatures in their APIs, but you will typically still have to pay more attention to types than in, e.g. Python.

If there is a specific set of functions in Makie that you think should accept `Vector{Any}`, you can file an issue there, but this isn’t something that’s going to change at the language level.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/makie-and-julia-do-not-automatically-typecast-obvious-numerical-representations/75148)._