Hi,

I was wondering if anyone could help clarify something for me. This is more due to my lack of understanding than anything else.

Suppose I had a module for testing, with two describe blocks. I declare a function with the same name in both, one with defaults, and one without. Perhaps owing to my OO background, I naively expected that these functions are in different scopes and therefore wouldn’t affect each other:

defmodule Sample.SampleTest do
  ...

  describe "test case A" do
    alias AnotherModule
    def helper_function(attrs \\ %{}) do
      ...
    end
  end

  describe "test case B" do
    alias AnotherModule
    def helper_function() do
      ...
    end
  end
end

However, I am getting an error that helper_function/0 conflicts with defaults from helper_function/1.

I presume that the functions are therefore scoped to the containing module? But then, I also have aliases within the describe blocks which don’t appear to be shared. (If I don’t include the alias, it fails to compile if I call a function from the module). How are these different?

If anyone could help me understand this it would be much appreciated.