Hello everyone, I've just started to write a bit of code in Julia and I'm still exploring the best ways of doing this and that. I'm having this small problem now and wanted to ask for your advice.
I'd like to have two methods that retrieve some items. The first method takes the max number of items that should be retrieved. And the second method takes the max item id. getitems( maxnumitems ) getitems( maxitemid ) In both cases the argument has the same type: Int. So how do I take the advantage of multiple dispatch mechanism in this situation? And is multiple dispatch really the recommended way of handling a situation like this one? Here're some alternatives that I thought of: 1. Use different function names: getitems, getitems_maxid. Not too elegant as you mix purpose and details of function usage in its name. 2. Use named arguments. This will cause the function implementation to grow (a series of if / else), again not too elegant. 3. Define a new type: ItemId which behaves exactly as Int but can be used to 'activate' multiple dispatch (one function would use Int and the second one would use ItemId). Generally not the best approach if you have methods each having an argument that should be really represented as an Int rather than a new type. 4. ...? What would you recommend ? Thank you, ks
