Is it feasible for Elixir to introduce dedicated float operators?

Chat / Discussions
1

Given:

(apologies for the ping, José!)

Is there a possibility that we could ever get dedicated float operators (+., *., >., …) like in OCaml and Gleam?

I’ve considered the following (what am I missing?):

  • Is there anything that would make this a technical no-go?
    …or maybe it’s already being considered?

  • Would it have to be a 2.0 feature?
    I imagine adding it as opt-in totally defeats the purpose, though I could see a path where we’d get a warning for doing 1 / 1.0 vs an error for 1 /. 1.0. I’m a bit fuzzy on the criteria for this as, for example, I believe the removal of imperative assignment was a post-1.0 feature, no?

  • We would need Integer.to_float/1 and Float.to_integer/1 functions.

What do you all think? Do any of you work on a codebase that would make this a nightmare scenario for you? Do math-heavy libraries like Nx rely heavily on overloaded operators?

2

Why would we want to do that? :slight_smile: Gleam does not really have multiple clauses, so it makes sense there, but in Elixir and Erlang they are very common. So I don’t see the benefit in going in this direction. Especially when there are so many statically typed languages with this exact feature too (Haskell, Go, Rust, etc).

3

My assumption was that it would make it possible to infer floats where guards are not needed:

def ints_dont_add_up(a, b) do
  a +. b
end

Because those languages aren’t Elixir… :grin: It just always felt a bit out of place not having them given that operators are otherwise not overloaded (at least in the core language).

I’m not sure I follow how multiple clauses comes into play since Haskell also has them. Although your answer along with the otherwise deafening silence has pretty much answered my question! It’s not a feature I’m dying for or anything which is why I created this as discussion and not a proposal.