Having come from Electrical Engineering with a Matlab background and being new to Julia, I can't understand why assignment of complex numbers was not automatic (e.g. sqrt(-3)). In many scientific and engineering endeavours the occurrence of complex numbers is very common and not always able to be predicted beforehand with the complex result a natural consequence of the data that was submitted to the analyses (which may just be time series real data for instance). Whilst there are many things I don't enjoy about Matlab the seamless integration of complex numbers was a natural for those used to writing i or j to denote a complex quantity. I can live with Julia's im syntax although really I would rather be able to define it to something I am used to, can I?
I guess though it is only the initial assignment of variables that has to be explicitly defined as complex and the rest of the code is written without explicit reference to its complex type and hence looks very similar to the Matlab code it is replacing?
