function definitions inside try / catch block behave differently in 0.5 - intended?

[tauu]

The following code behaves differently in julia v0.4 and julia v0.5

try
  function test(x)
    return x+1;
  end
end

In Julia v0.4 it returns

  test (generic function with 1 method)

whereas in Julia v0.5 I get

  (::test) (generic function with 1 method)

So in Julia v0.5 the method is not defined in global scope. This is even the case if a function in global scope exists. For Example:

import Base.show
type myType
  text::AbstractString
end

try
  function show(io::IO,::MIME"text/plain",mt::myType)
    return string("-- ", mt.text, " --");
  end
end

will actually not create a new method for the function Base.show, but a new local function show with one method.

Is this change intended? I couldn't find anything about it in the release notes.

[JeffBezanson]

It looks like this was a bug in 0.4, since try blocks introduce scopes. For example in 0.4:

julia> for i=1:1
        function test(x)
          x+1
        end
       end

julia> test
ERROR: UndefVarError: test not defined

so other blocks that introduce scopes behaved this way before, but not try blocks for some reason.

[TotalVerb]

Use global function show(...) instead of function show(...) to explicitly define a function in global scope.

[tauu]

Thanks for the clarification! :-)

try global function show(...) end works in v0.5 👍 , but doesn't work in v0.4 :-/ So its not ideal for backwards compatibility, but at least it works :-)

[TotalVerb]

This should work on both:

try
    global foo
    function foo(...) ... end

[tauu]

works, thanks! :-)

[kshyatt]

works, thanks! :-)

Sounds like this was resolved? Feel free to reopen if not, @tauu :).