is there any way to define overload functions with different arity, e.g in C# I can just do:
foo(bar)
or
foo(bar, baz)
In Elixir, the only way to do that would be to put them in separate modules, which will get messy pretty quickly. Is there any way around it?
Edit: I had made a wrong assumption. The examples of overloaded functions I saw happened to have the same arity, so I (wrongly) assumed that this was a requirement. Functions are uniquely identified by their name and arity, so you can in fact overload functions with different arity.
In Erlang and Elixir, and unlike many other languages (such as C#), functions are uniquely identified by their name and arity, so technically foo(bar)
and foo(bar, baz)
are totally different functions. But that's really just a technicality, to write an 'overloaded' function in Elixir, you would write something like the following definition of sum
:
defmodule Math do
def sum(list), do: sum(list, 0)
def sum([], acc), do: acc
def sum([h|t], acc), do: sum(t, acc + h)
end