In Fortran and some other languages, you can write exp(x) whether x is a scalar or an array. In Julia, you need to write exp.(x) if x is an array. What is the benefit of requiring the dot?

There are plenty of functions that would be ambiguous, such as multiplication between two matrices of the same shape – do you want that to be matrix multiplication or elementwise? You need both for e.g. convolutional neural networks. Languages like Python with numpy generally make those choices on a…

There is a well defined function usually called “exponential” of a matrix. It is not equal generally to the exponential of each element of the matrix. You can see this: julia> a = rand(10,10) julia> exp(a) == exp.(a) false If exp(a) did the exponential of every element of the matrix, how would you…

[image] Satvik: There are plenty of functions that would be ambiguous, such as multiplication between two matrices of the same shape – do you want that to be matrix multiplication or elementwise? I would say that this kind of disambiguation is a useful side effect of requiring dots for broadc…

[image] stevengj: You want the caller to decide what functions to apply elementwise, and it should work for any function. The function implementor should not need to decide this in advance, as explained here . Can’t overstate how much how a great decision that was. I’m regularly amazed when w…

Why does Julia require a . for broadcasting?

Internals & Design

Topic		Replies	Views
Why are there broadcast versions of functions? Internals & Design question	17	5608	December 31, 2017
Not a great example New to Julia	9	1305	February 10, 2020
@. weird behavior New to Julia	10	753	February 13, 2020
Bad performance in simple array broadcast operations Performance broadcast	5	1149	October 12, 2019
Broadcasting across a nested array General Usage broadcasting	47	4431	March 14, 2019

Why does Julia require a . for broadcasting?

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