Today I'm studying Elixir protocols and stumbled upon something I found curious.
Enumerable came to mind pretty quickly for me as a good example for protocols. The interesting thing that I noticed is the default implementations of Enumerable for Elixir types is a little underwhelming. In particular count/1 and member?/2 aren't even implemented on the protocol. As it turns out, I discovered that _many_ Enum functions for lists in Enum directly instead of in terms of the protocol (e.g. https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/c07c345c3c7f2c48531ffe441099c755e34a3679/lib/elixir/lib/enum.ex#L2690-L2700). Of course, I understand that the behavior is OK as is, but it seems to create a little confusion for me about the purpose of the protocol in addition to be a bad example. I have some suspicion that there might be an optimization involved here, but I'm curious to hear more about the reason for this design. Also, I'd love to take a shot at any improvements that might be involved. Thanks! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elixir-lang-core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to elixir-lang-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/05049472-813d-42af-ad18-67ff8da5d2e0%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
