Book Image

Julia 1.0 Programming Complete Reference Guide

By : Ivo Balbaert, Adrian Salceanu
Book Image

Julia 1.0 Programming Complete Reference Guide

By: Ivo Balbaert, Adrian Salceanu

Overview of this book

Julia offers the high productivity and ease of use of Python and R with the lightning-fast speed of C++. There’s never been a better time to learn this language, thanks to its large-scale adoption across a wide range of domains, including fintech, biotech and artificial intelligence (AI). You will begin by learning how to set up a running Julia platform, before exploring its various built-in types. This Learning Path walks you through two important collection types: arrays and matrices. You’ll be taken through how type conversions and promotions work, and in further chapters you'll study how Julia interacts with operating systems and other languages. You’ll also learn about the use of macros, what makes Julia suitable for numerical and scientific computing, and how to run external programs. Once you have grasped the basics, this Learning Path goes on to how to analyze the Iris dataset using DataFrames. While building a web scraper and a web app, you’ll explore the use of functions, methods, and multiple dispatches. In the final chapters, you'll delve into machine learning, where you'll build a book recommender system. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll be well versed with Julia and have the skills you need to leverage its high speed and efficiency for your applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Julia 1.0 Programming - Second Edition by Ivo Balbaert • Julia Programming Projects by Adrian Salceanu
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Evaluation and interpolation

With the definition of type Expr from the preceding section, we can also build expressions directly from the constructor for Expr. For example: e1 = Expr(:call, *, 3, 4) returns :((*)(3, 4)) (follow along with the code in Chapter 7\eval.jl).

The result of an expression can be computed with the eval function, eval(e1), which returns 12 in this case. At the time an expression is constructed, not all the symbols have to be defined, but they have to be defined at the time of evaluation, otherwise an error occurs.

For example, e2 = Expr(:call, *, 3, :a) returns :((*)(3, a)), and eval(e2) then gives ERROR: UndefVarError: a not defined. Only after we say, for example, a = 4 does eval(e2) return 12.

Expressions can also change the state of the execution environment, for example, the expression e3 = :(b = 1) assigns a value to b when evaluated...