Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia

Implementing getter functions

In mainstream object-oriented languages, we often implement getters for accessing the fields of an object. In Julia, we can also create getter functions. When implementing getter functions, we can choose which fields to expose as part of the application programming interface (API). For our example, we will implement getter functions for both fields, as follows:

get_heatmap(s::Simulation) = s.heatmapget_stats(s::Simulation) = s.stats

Our choice of function names here is somewhat non-idiomatic for the Julia language. A better convention is to use the nouns directly:

heatmap(s::Simulation) = s.heatmapstats(s::Simulation) = s.stats

So, when we read the code that uses the heatmap function, we can read it as the ...