I feel that x^2 must among the things that are convenient and fast; it's one of those language elements that people simply depend on. If it's inconvenient, then people are going to experience that over and over. If it's not fast enough people are going experience slowness over and over.
Like Simon says it's already a thing <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2741>. Maybe use of something like VML is an option or necessary, or maybe extending inference.jl or maybe even it eventually might not be necessary <http://llvm.org/docs/Vectorizers.html>. Julia is a fundamental improvement, but give Matlab and Octave their due, that syntax is great. When I say essentially C, to me it means Option A use built in infix: X.^y versus Option B go write a function pow(x,y) for i = 1 ... for j = .... ... etc Option A is just too good, it has to be supported. What to do? Is this a fundamental flaw? No I don't think so. Is this a one time only thing? It feels like no, this is one of many things that will occasionally occur. Is it possible to make this a hassle? Like I think Tony is saying, can/should there be a "branch of immediate optimizations?" Stuff that would eventually be done in a better way but needs to be completed now. It's a branch so things can be collected and retracted more coherently.
