Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia

Understanding the constraint with generic functions

One drawback of the preceding method is that we must define the original function as an anonymous function rather than a generic function. That seems to be a major constraint. The question is why doesn't it work with generic function?

Let's do a quick test by starting a new Julia REPL, defining the original fib function again, and wrapping it with the same memoize function:

The problem is that fib is already defined as a generic function, and it cannot be bound to a new anonymous function, which is what is being returned from the memoize function. To work around the issue, we may be tempted ...