Learning Julia

Understanding methods

Methods are a very important part of Julia's ecosystem. To better understand what multiple dispatch is and why Julia uses it, we need to get familiar with methods first.

Suppose we have a function that adds two numbers:

julia> function add_numbers(num1::Int64, num2::Int64)           return num1 + num2        endadd_numbers (generic function with 1 method)

If you closely observe the function definition, we have defined the add_numbers() to take in two arguments. Both of them being integer values (Int64, as I am currently on a 64-bit machine). What happens when we call the function add_numbers(10,20)? We get the following result:

julia> add_numbers(10,20)30julia> typeof(ans)Int64

No surprises here, as 10+20 =30. Also, notice the type ...