Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia

Designing abstract types

Similar to many other objected-oriented programming languages, Julia supports a hierarchy of abstract types. Abstract types are typically used to model real-world data concepts; for example, an Animal could be an abstract type for a cat or dog, and a Vehicle can be an abstract type for a car, truck, or bus. Being able to group types together and give the group a single name allows Julia programmers to apply generic code that is common to those types.

Abstract types are often conveniently defined in a type hierarchy for a specific domain. We can describe the relationship between abstract types as parent–child, or more technically, an is-a-subtype-of relationship. The terminology for the parent type and child type is  ...