The meaning of “meaning” A common theme that comes up when discussing type-piracy/method merging, etc. is that there “can only be one meaning” for a given function without namespace qualifications (I am being careful there to say function, not method). I just want to get some clarification from th…

I think I would agree that your issue is more with punning. And, just to be clear, you said above that: Thank you, that is helpful and precise definition of type piracy. Of course, there are cases (particularly any operators defined in Base or other packages you want to use) where you have no choi…

[image] mbauman: You’re reaching out of your module and messing with someone else’s. Meaning doesn’t really have any bearing on whether something is doing piracy or not. [image] rdeits: which is still not true. Defining a Base method on your own type is perfectly fine and not type piracy …

[image] jlperla: (Just wanted to point out this seems slightly out of sync with @mbauman definition above) Nope, we’re in agreement. There’s an implicit AND within my statement that I probably could have made clearer. Type piracy requires two things: You’re extending a function you don’t …

[image] jlperla: If so, then it sounds like “Type Piracy” should almost always be discouraged or treated with a great deal of caution. Definitely agreed. OK, so based on this definition, if I define + on MyNumber <: Number it is not type piracy, and if was to add in a package to extend Dist…

Just to show that we’re not kidding around about type piracy being a bad idea, try this: julia> Base.:+(::Int, ::Int) = 2 fatal: error thrown and no exception handler available. UndefRefError() rec_backtrace at /buildworker/worker/package_linux64/build/src/stackwalk.c:84 record_backtrace at /build…

[image] rdeits: Just to show that we’re not kidding around about type piracy being a bad idea, I need no convincing! Your precise definition of type piracy was enough for me, and I find it hard to think of examples where it would be a good idea. That said, it also seems like it is unlikely…

[image] ChrisRackauckas: That can only happen if someone knows the existence of both packages. Agreed, it is a really neat example, but I also think it may be more instructive as an example of why broad conversions and promotions with abstract base types are dangerous (as I am pretty sure it …

[image] jlperla: And (in cases where it is not type-piracy) what is wrong with punning on disjoint sets of types? It can be an issue with readability. The problem that I’ve seen in practice, is that if you are looking at a piece of generic code, and you see: a * b ^ c, you have zero idea wh…

I don’t think punning is bad, who is to say the Base is the right term and anything else a pun? I also think that methods should be allowed to merge , reduce can mean related but different things defined in different modules , which have no interest in extending each other because they are unaware …

[image] TsurHerman: I don’t think punning is bad, who is to say the Base is the right term and anything else a pun? I don’t think that’s what people have been saying. My understanding is that punning is really bad when a name has different meanings in the same namespace. It’s not a problem …

"Meaning", type-piracy, and method merging

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"Meaning", type-piracy, and method merging

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