Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia

Revisiting struct definitions and constructors

Let's first take a look at how a struct is defined and what constructor is provided. Consider the use case of text style configuration for a text editing application.

We may define a struct as follows:

struct TextStyle    font_family    font_size    font_weight    foreground_color    background_color    alignment    rotationend

By default, Julia provides a constructor with positional arguments for all fields in the same order as how they are defined in the struct. So, the only way to create a TextStyle object is to do the following:

style = TextStyle("Arial", 11, "Bold", "black", "white", "left", 0)

There is nothing wrong here, but we could argue that the code is not very readable. Every time we have to write code ...