I agree, for all new code–written from scratch–I would rather have Julia’s default behavior. I’m only thinking of a new type to help with porting, kind of like training wheels, you could later take off (or not), why I want the exact same semantics, then could later change to “1 + only([1])”. The first step would be such a type, and possibly a package, with a macro to apply it (to e.g. functions) with same syntax, similar to e.g.:
If you want MATLAB-semantics globally, this could help (extended to arrays):
As always in software, you should first get correct, then optimize for speed. So, you would take off the “training-wheels” to enable the faster Julia semantics (assuming the semantics of growing arrays automatically isn’t actually used). Or for non-speed critical code could leave in.