Julia: Lower standalone dotted infix operators as anonymous functions

[mbauman]

I could've sworn we already had an issue tracking this, but I couldn't find it. In short, I'd love to have support for standalone (.+) and friends to lower to (args...)->(+).(args...). This would enable their use in higher order functions and generally make them more useful.

They currently parse as identifiers — and can be assigned to! — so this would be a breaking minor change.

[ararslan]

Would it be weird to be able to do e.g. map(.+, a, b) but not map(f., a, b) in general?

[JeffBezanson]

It would be nice, at least, to have a non-weird :smile: syntax for that, e.g. broadcast(f). Unfortunately that is already defined to do f(), but that is fairly useless.

[StefanKarpinski]

Maybe broadcasted(f)?

[mbauman]

Unfortunately Base.broadcasted(f) is simply the lazy version of broadcast(f). It's similarly varargs and, when materialized, it also means f().