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Everything You Need To Know About Types In Julia

A full overview of the type system in Julia, and some key things you need to know about it.

Emma Boudreau
Towards Data Science
8 min readJan 15, 2022

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(Image by Open-Clip-Art-Vectors on Pixabay)

Introduction

In my opinion, for being a dynamically-typed language, types still need to be thought of a lot in Julia. This is actually something I much prefer to the other languages out there that are sometimes trying to hide types and implicitly change types for you. Things like that in JavaScript drive me to the brink of insanity, so a type system like Julia’s (amazing) one is quite refreshing to work in. Coming from a lot of other languages, I feel Julia’s type system is quite robust and likely one of the best that I have used.

However, with any dynamically-typed type system, there are bound to be some oddities and nuances to the specific design of how the types are held and can be changed and manipulated. This is on top of Julia being JIT-compiled, and… oh yeah…

using multiple dispatch as a programming paradigm.

Today I am going to share with you everything that I know about types, from an interfacing with data structures, constructors, and methods with types to learning more about your types and even building complicated constructors.

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Emma Boudreau
Emma Boudreau

Written by Emma Boudreau

i am a computer nerd. I love art, programming, and hiking. https://github.com/emmaccode

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