Book Image

Julia 1.0 Programming - Second Edition

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Julia 1.0 Programming - Second Edition

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

The release of Julia 1.0 is now ready to change the technical world by combining the high productivity and ease of use of Python and R with the lightning-fast speed of C++. Julia 1.0 programming gives you a head start in tackling your numerical and data problems. You will begin by learning how to set up a running Julia platform, before exploring its various built-in types. With the help of practical examples, this book walks you through two important collection types: arrays and matrices. In addition to this, you will be taken through how type conversions and promotions work. In the course of the book, you will be introduced to the homo-iconicity and metaprogramming concepts in Julia. You will understand how Julia provides different ways to interact with an operating system, as well as other languages, and then you'll discover what macros are. Once you have grasped the basics, you’ll study what makes Julia suitable for numerical and scientific computing, and learn about the features provided by Julia. By the end of this book, you will also have learned how to run external programs. This book covers all you need to know about Julia in order to leverage its high speed and efficiency for your applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Variables, Types, and Operations

Julia is an optionally typed language, which means that the user can choose to specify the type of arguments passed to a function and the type of variables used inside a function. Julia's type system is the key for its performance; understanding it well is important, and it can pay off to use type annotations, not only for documentation or tooling, but also for execution speed. This chapter discusses the realm of elementary built-in types in Julia, the operations that can be performed on them, as well as the important concepts of types and scope.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

  • Variables, naming conventions, and comments
  • Types
  • Integers
  • Floating point numbers
  • Elementary mathematical functions and operations
  • Rational and complex numbers
  • Characters
  • Strings
  • Regular expressions
  • Ranges and arrays
  • Dates and times
  • Scope and constants

You will need to follow along by typing in the examples in the REPL, or executing the code snippets in the code files...