Misplaced assignment statement

New to Julia
1

my code is giving me an error: LoadError: syntax: misplaced assignment statement in “[T = BigInt]”
what does this error mean?

2

Welcome!
What are trying to do? This does not look like valid Julia. You can post your code here in triple backtick quotes. Someone will be happy to look it over…

1 Like
3

I’m trying to use the setprecision function, exactly as described in the docs:
setprecision([T=BigInt,], 512, 2)
just with different values for the precision and base

4

Try setprecision(BigInt, 512, 2). The square brackets indicate optional argument in the documentation.

5 Likes
5

The error means the assignment T = BigInt is incorrectly placed. In Julia, assignments like this are not allowed within type parameter brackets.

6

Just to be clear, that’s not valid syntax for a method definition header, though it’s certainly based on it. A leading optional argument isn’t possible to parse, it’s a docstring shorthand for separately written method definitions. Also note that method definition headers do not mirror method calls exactly. For example, you could define methods by writing foo(a=1) = a, but the call foo(a=1) does not work.

For another example of documentation deviating from Julia syntax, map methods for Arrays are documented with the signature:

 map(f, A::AbstractArray...) -> N-array

N-array doesn’t mean anything in Julia, and -> is not used for types of return values in Julia source code.