Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia

Implementing setter functions

For mutable types, we may implement setters. The scope would include fields that can only ever be mutated. For our simulation project, suppose that we want to allow the client program to do some transformation of the heatmap and put it back to the object. We can support that use case easily, as shown in the following code snippet:

function heatmap!(        s::Simulation{N},         new_heatmap::AbstractArray{Float64, N}) where {N}    s.heatmap = new_heatmap    s.stats = (mean = mean(new_heatmap), std = std(new_heatmap))    return nothingend

The setter function, heatmap!, accepts a Simulation object and a new heatmap array. Because the stats field contains the statistics of the underlying heatmap, we must maintain consistency within ...