Breaking behavior with nested function definitions

[davidanthoff]

This used to work on julia 0.4:

   _       _ _(_)_     |  A fresh approach to technical computing
  (_)     | (_) (_)    |  Documentation: http://docs.julialang.org
   _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?help" for help.
  | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
  | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 0.5.0-rc2+0 (2016-08-12 11:25 UTC)
 _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official http://julialang.org/ release
|__/                   |  x86_64-w64-mingw32

julia> function f(x)
         if x
           bar()=5
         else
           bar()=1
         end
         return bar
       end
WARNING: Method definition bar() in module Main at REPL[1]:3 overwritten at REPL[1]:5.
f (generic function with 1 method)

julia> f(true)
(::bar) (generic function with 1 method)

julia> f(false)
ERROR: UndefVarError: bar not defined
 in f(::Bool) at .\REPL[1]:7

julia>

There are two things that I find strange: why is there a warning when I compile f? And why doesn't the second invocation work?

I am aware that one can use anonymous functions instead.

It is not clear to me whether this is a bug, or by design. If by design, it would be good to mention this in the NEWS section. Also, if by design, is there still a point to allow these nested function definitions at all?

[andreasnoack]

I hit this one yesterday. It's #15602