.. _man-conversion-and-promotion:

**************************
 Conversion and Promotion  
**************************

Julia has a system for promoting arguments of mathematical operators to
a common type, which has been mentioned in various other sections,
including :ref:`man-integers-and-floating-point-numbers`, :ref:`man-mathematical-operations`, :ref:`man-types`, and
:ref:`man-methods`. In this section, we explain how this promotion
system works, as well as how to extend it to new types and apply it to
functions besides built-in mathematical operators. Traditionally,
programming languages fall into two camps with respect to promotion of
arithmetic arguments:

-  **Automatic promotion for built-in arithmetic types and operators.**
   In most languages, built-in numeric types, when used as operands to
   arithmetic operators with infix syntax, such as ``+``, ``-``, ``*``,
   and ``/``, are automatically promoted to a common type to produce the
   expected results. C, Java, Perl, and Python, to name a few, all
   correctly compute the sum ``1 + 1.5`` as the floating-point value
   ``2.5``, even though one of the operands to ``+`` is an integer.
   These systems are convenient and designed carefully enough that they
   are generally all-but-invisible to the programmer: hardly anyone
   consciously thinks of this promotion taking place when writing such
   an expression, but compilers and interpreters must perform conversion
   before addition since integers and floating-point values cannot be
   added as-is. Complex rules for such automatic conversions are thus
   inevitably part of specifications and implementations for such
   languages.
-  **No automatic promotion.** This camp includes Ada and ML — very
   "strict" statically typed languages. In these languages, every
   conversion must be explicitly specified by the programmer. Thus, the
   example expression ``1 + 1.5`` would be a compilation error in both
   Ada and ML. Instead one must write ``real(1) + 1.5``, explicitly
   converting the integer ``1`` to a floating-point value before
   performing addition. Explicit conversion everywhere is so
   inconvenient, however, that even Ada has some degree of automatic
   conversion: integer literals are promoted to the expected integer
   type automatically, and floating-point literals are similarly
   promoted to appropriate floating-point types.

In a sense, Julia falls into the "no automatic promotion" category:
mathematical operators are just functions with special syntax, and the
arguments of functions are never automatically converted. However, one
may observe that applying mathematical operations to a wide variety of
mixed argument types is just an extreme case of polymorphic multiple
dispatch — something which Julia's dispatch and type systems are
particularly well-suited to handle. "Automatic" promotion of
mathematical operands simply emerges as a special application: Julia
comes with pre-defined catch-all dispatch rules for mathematical
operators, invoked when no specific implementation exists for some
combination of operand types. These catch-all rules first promote all
operands to a common type using user-definable promotion rules, and then
invoke a specialized implementation of the operator in question for the
resulting values, now of the same type. User-defined types can easily
participate in this promotion system by defining methods for conversion
to and from other types, and providing a handful of promotion rules
defining what types they should promote to when mixed with other types.

.. _man-conversion:

Conversion
----------

Conversion of values to various types is performed by the ``convert``
function. The ``convert`` function generally takes two arguments: the
first is a type object while the second is a value to convert to that
type; the returned value is the value converted to an instance of given
type. The simplest way to understand this function is to see it in
action:

.. doctest::

    julia> x = 12
    12

    julia> typeof(x)
    Int64

    julia> convert(Uint8, x)
    0x0c

    julia> typeof(ans)
    Uint8

    julia> convert(FloatingPoint, x)
    12.0

    julia> typeof(ans)
    Float64

Conversion isn't always possible, in which case a no method error is
thrown indicating that ``convert`` doesn't know how to perform the
requested conversion:

.. doctest::

    julia> convert(FloatingPoint, "foo")
    ERROR: `convert` has no method matching convert(::Type{FloatingPoint}, ::ASCIIString)
     in convert at base.jl:13

Some languages consider parsing strings as numbers or formatting
numbers as strings to be conversions (many dynamic languages will even
perform conversion for you automatically), however Julia does not: even
though some strings can be parsed as numbers, most strings are not valid
representations of numbers, and only a very limited subset of them are.

Defining New Conversions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To define a new conversion, simply provide a new method for ``convert``.
That's really all there is to it. For example, the method to convert a
number to a boolean is simply this::

    convert(::Type{Bool}, x::Number) = (x!=0)

The type of the first argument of this method is a :ref:`singleton
type <man-singleton-types>`, ``Type{Bool}``, the only instance of
which is ``Bool``. Thus, this method is only invoked when the first
argument is the type value ``Bool``. Notice the syntax used for the first
argument: the argument name is omitted prior to the ``::`` symbol, and only
the type is given.  This is the syntax in Julia for a function argument whose type is
specified but whose value is never used in the function body.  In this example,
since the type is a singleton, there would never be any reason to use its value
within the body.
When invoked, the method determines
whether a numeric value is true or false as a boolean, by comparing it
to zero:

.. doctest::

    julia> convert(Bool, 1)
    true

    julia> convert(Bool, 0)
    false

    julia> convert(Bool, 1im)
    ERROR: InexactError()
     in convert at complex.jl:18

    julia> convert(Bool, 0im)
    false

The method signatures for conversion methods are often quite a bit more
involved than this example, especially for parametric types. The example 
above is meant to be pedagogical, and is not the actual julia behaviour.
This is the actual implementation in julia::

    convert{T<:Real}(::Type{T}, z::Complex) = (imag(z)==0 ? convert(T,real(z)) :
                                               throw(InexactError()))

    julia> convert(Bool, 1im)
    InexactError()
     in convert at complex.jl:40


Case Study: Rational Conversions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To continue our case study of Julia's ``Rational`` type, here are the
conversions declared in
`rational.jl <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/base/rational.jl>`_,
right after the declaration of the type and its constructors::

    convert{T<:Integer}(::Type{Rational{T}}, x::Rational) = Rational(convert(T,x.num),convert(T,x.den))
    convert{T<:Integer}(::Type{Rational{T}}, x::Integer) = Rational(convert(T,x), convert(T,1))

    function convert{T<:Integer}(::Type{Rational{T}}, x::FloatingPoint, tol::Real)
        if isnan(x); return zero(T)//zero(T); end
        if isinf(x); return sign(x)//zero(T); end
        y = x
        a = d = one(T)
        b = c = zero(T)
        while true
            f = convert(T,round(y)); y -= f
            a, b, c, d = f*a+c, f*b+d, a, b
            if y == 0 || abs(a/b-x) <= tol
                return a//b
            end
            y = 1/y
        end
    end
    convert{T<:Integer}(rt::Type{Rational{T}}, x::FloatingPoint) = convert(rt,x,eps(x))

    convert{T<:FloatingPoint}(::Type{T}, x::Rational) = convert(T,x.num)/convert(T,x.den)
    convert{T<:Integer}(::Type{T}, x::Rational) = div(convert(T,x.num),convert(T,x.den))

The initial four convert methods provide conversions to rational types.
The first method converts one type of rational to another type of
rational by converting the numerator and denominator to the appropriate
integer type. The second method does the same conversion for integers by
taking the denominator to be 1. The third method implements a standard
algorithm for approximating a floating-point number by a ratio of
integers to within a given tolerance, and the fourth method applies it,
using machine epsilon at the given value as the threshold. In general,
one should have ``a//b == convert(Rational{Int64}, a/b)``.

The last two convert methods provide conversions from rational types to
floating-point and integer types. To convert to floating point, one
simply converts both numerator and denominator to that floating point
type and then divides. To convert to integer, one can use the ``div``
operator for truncated integer division (rounded towards zero).

.. _man-promotion:

Promotion
---------

Promotion refers to converting values of mixed types to a single common
type. Although it is not strictly necessary, it is generally implied
that the common type to which the values are converted can faithfully
represent all of the original values. In this sense, the term
"promotion" is appropriate since the values are converted to a "greater"
type — i.e. one which can represent all of the input values in a single
common type. It is important, however, not to confuse this with
object-oriented (structural) super-typing, or Julia's notion of abstract
super-types: promotion has nothing to do with the type hierarchy, and
everything to do with converting between alternate representations. For
instance, although every ``Int32`` value can also be represented as a
``Float64`` value, ``Int32`` is not a subtype of ``Float64``.

Promotion to a common supertype is performed in Julia by the ``promote``
function, which takes any number of arguments, and returns a tuple of
the same number of values, converted to a common type, or throws an
exception if promotion is not possible. The most common use case for
promotion is to convert numeric arguments to a common type:

.. doctest::

    julia> promote(1, 2.5)
    (1.0,2.5)

    julia> promote(1, 2.5, 3)
    (1.0,2.5,3.0)

    julia> promote(2, 3//4)
    (2//1,3//4)

    julia> promote(1, 2.5, 3, 3//4)
    (1.0,2.5,3.0,0.75)

    julia> promote(1.5, im)
    (1.5 + 0.0im,0.0 + 1.0im)

    julia> promote(1 + 2im, 3//4)
    (1//1 + 2//1*im,3//4 + 0//1*im)

Floating-point values are promoted to the largest of the floating-point
argument types. Integer values are promoted to the larger of either the
native machine word size or the largest integer argument type.
Mixtures of integers and floating-point values are promoted to a
floating-point type big enough to hold all the values. Integers mixed
with rationals are promoted to rationals. Rationals mixed with floats
are promoted to floats. Complex values mixed with real values are
promoted to the appropriate kind of complex value.

That is really all there is to using promotions. The rest is just a
matter of clever application, the most typical "clever" application
being the definition of catch-all methods for numeric operations like
the arithmetic operators ``+``, ``-``, ``*`` and ``/``. Here are some of
the the catch-all method definitions given in
`promotion.jl <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/base/promotion.jl>`_::

    +(x::Number, y::Number) = +(promote(x,y)...)
    -(x::Number, y::Number) = -(promote(x,y)...)
    *(x::Number, y::Number) = *(promote(x,y)...)
    /(x::Number, y::Number) = /(promote(x,y)...)

These method definitions say that in the absence of more specific rules
for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing pairs of numeric
values, promote the values to a common type and then try again. That's
all there is to it: nowhere else does one ever need to worry about
promotion to a common numeric type for arithmetic operations — it just
happens automatically. There are definitions of catch-all promotion
methods for a number of other arithmetic and mathematical functions in
`promotion.jl <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/base/promotion.jl>`_,
but beyond that, there are hardly any calls to ``promote`` required in
the Julia standard library. The most common usages of ``promote`` occur
in outer constructors methods, provided for convenience, to allow
constructor calls with mixed types to delegate to an inner type with
fields promoted to an appropriate common type. For example, recall that
`rational.jl <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/base/rational.jl>`_
provides the following outer constructor method::

    Rational(n::Integer, d::Integer) = Rational(promote(n,d)...)

This allows calls like the following to work:

.. doctest::

    julia> Rational(int8(15),int32(-5))
    -3//1

    julia> typeof(ans)
    Rational{Int64} (constructor with 1 method)

For most user-defined types, it is better practice to require
programmers to supply the expected types to constructor functions
explicitly, but sometimes, especially for numeric problems, it can be
convenient to do promotion automatically.

Defining Promotion Rules
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Although one could, in principle, define methods for the ``promote``
function directly, this would require many redundant definitions for all
possible permutations of argument types. Instead, the behavior of
``promote`` is defined in terms of an auxiliary function called
``promote_rule``, which one can provide methods for. The
``promote_rule`` function takes a pair of type objects and returns
another type object, such that instances of the argument types will be
promoted to the returned type. Thus, by defining the rule::

    promote_rule(::Type{Float64}, ::Type{Float32} ) = Float64

one declares that when 64-bit and 32-bit floating-point values are
promoted together, they should be promoted to 64-bit floating-point. The
promotion type does not need to be one of the argument types, however;
the following promotion rules both occur in Julia's standard library::

    promote_rule(::Type{Uint8}, ::Type{Int8}) = Int
    promote_rule(::Type{Char}, ::Type{Uint8}) = Int32

As a general rule, Julia promotes integers to `Int` during computation
order to avoid overflow. In the latter case, the result type is
``Int32`` since ``Int32`` is large enough to contain all possible
Unicode code points, and numeric operations on characters always
result in plain old integers unless explicitly cast back to characters
(see :ref:`man-characters`). Also note that one does not need to
define both ``promote_rule(::Type{A}, ::Type{B})`` and
``promote_rule(::Type{B}, ::Type{A})`` — the symmetry is implied by
the way ``promote_rule`` is used in the promotion process.

The ``promote_rule`` function is used as a building block to define a
second function called ``promote_type``, which, given any number of type
objects, returns the common type to which those values, as arguments to
``promote`` should be promoted. Thus, if one wants to know, in absence
of actual values, what type a collection of values of certain types
would promote to, one can use ``promote_type``:

.. doctest::

    julia> promote_type(Int8, Uint16)
    Int64

Internally, ``promote_type`` is used inside of ``promote`` to determine
what type argument values should be converted to for promotion. It can,
however, be useful in its own right. The curious reader can read the
code in
`promotion.jl <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/base/promotion.jl>`_,
which defines the complete promotion mechanism in about 35 lines.

Case Study: Rational Promotions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Finally, we finish off our ongoing case study of Julia's rational number
type, which makes relatively sophisticated use of the promotion
mechanism with the following promotion rules::

    promote_rule{T<:Integer}(::Type{Rational{T}}, ::Type{T}) = Rational{T}
    promote_rule{T<:Integer,S<:Integer}(::Type{Rational{T}}, ::Type{S}) = Rational{promote_type(T,S)}
    promote_rule{T<:Integer,S<:Integer}(::Type{Rational{T}}, ::Type{Rational{S}}) = Rational{promote_type(T,S)}
    promote_rule{T<:Integer,S<:FloatingPoint}(::Type{Rational{T}}, ::Type{S}) = promote_type(T,S)

The first rule asserts that promotion of a rational number with its own
numerator/denominator type, simply promotes to itself. The second rule
says that promoting a rational number with any other integer type
promotes to a rational type whose numerator/denominator type is the
result of promotion of its numerator/denominator type with the other
integer type. The third rule applies the same logic to two different
types of rational numbers, resulting in a rational of the promotion of
their respective numerator/denominator types. The fourth and final rule
dictates that promoting a rational with a float results in the same type
as promoting the numerator/denominator type with the float.

This small handful of promotion rules, together with the `conversion
methods discussed above <#case-study-rational-conversions>`_, are
sufficient to make rational numbers interoperate completely naturally
with all of Julia's other numeric types — integers, floating-point
numbers, and complex numbers. By providing appropriate conversion
methods and promotion rules in the same manner, any user-defined numeric
type can interoperate just as naturally with Julia's predefined
numerics.
