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munificent • today at 5:29 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

> From my perspective, Go added methods primarily so that you can use them in combination with interfaces.

They also give you a limited form of overloading. Without methods or overloading, you end up in the situation that C and Scheme are in where every operation on a data structure has to redundantly have the data structure in its name like:

    list_clear(my_list);
    queue_clear(my_queue);
    map_clear(my_map);

Replies

kune • today at 6:20 PM

In Go you would methods for that: my_list.Clear(), my_queue.Clear() and my_map.Clear(). Now you can define a Clearer interface, which has only the Clear method. That allows you to write a function clearAndLog(item Clearer) and it will work with the list, queue and map.

wasmperson • today at 9:38 PM

> Without methods or overloading, you end up in the situation that C and Scheme are in

Well in C at least we now have this:

  #define clear(s) _Generic((s) \
          ,struct list: list_clear \
          ,struct queue: queue_clear \
          ,struct map: map_clear \
  )(s)

  clear(my_map);
  clear(my_list);
  clear(my_queue);
...although it turns out the other nice thing about methods is automatic namespacing.