Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

Overview of this book

Solidity is a contract-oriented language whose syntax is highly influenced by JavaScript, and is designed to compile code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Solidity Programming Essentials will be your guide to understanding Solidity programming to build smart contracts for Ethereum and blockchain from ground-up. We begin with a brief run-through of blockchain, Ethereum, and their most important concepts or components. You will learn how to install all the necessary tools to write, test, and debug Solidity contracts on Ethereum. Then, you will explore the layout of a Solidity source file and work with the different data types. The next set of recipes will help you work with operators, control structures, and data structures while building your smart contracts. We take you through function calls, return types, function modifers, and recipes in object-oriented programming with Solidity. Learn all you can on event logging and exception handling, as well as testing and debugging smart contracts. By the end of this book, you will be able to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum. This book will bring forth the essence of writing contracts using Solidity and also help you develop Solidity skills in no time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Variables hoisting


Hoisting a concept is where variables need not be declared and initialized before using the variable. The variable declaration can happen at any place within a function, even after using it. This is known as variable hoisting. The Solidity compiler extracts all variables declared anywhere within a function and places them at the top or beginning of a function and we all know that declaring a variable in Solidity also initializes them with their respective default values. This ensures that the variables are available throughout the function.

In the following example, firstVar, secondVar, and result are declared towards the end of the function but utilized at the beginning of the function. However, when the compiler generates the bytecode for the contract, it declares all variables as the first set of instructions in a function as shown in the following screenshot: