Book Image

Learn Red ? Fundamentals of Red

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Learn Red ? Fundamentals of Red

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

A key problem of software development today is software bloat, where huge toolchains and development environments are needed in software coding and deployment. Red significantly reduces this bloat by offering a minimalist but complete toolchain. This is the first introductory book about it, and it will get you up and running with Red as quickly as possible. This book shows you how to write effective functions, reduce code redundancies, and improve code reuse. It will be helpful for new programmers who are starting out with Red to explore its wide and ever-growing package ecosystem and also for experienced developers who want to add Red to their skill set. The book presents the fundamentals of programming in Red and in-depth informative examples using a step-by-step approach. You will be taken through concepts and examples such as doing simple metaprogramming, functions, collections, GUI applications, and more. By the end of the book, you will be fully equipped to start your own projects in Red.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
11
Assessments

Using objects

Now we will discover how Red works with objects, which is probably different from what you are used to in classical object-oriented languages, such as Java, C#, Python, and Ruby. But first, we meet the make word.

The make word

In the Using error? section in Chapter 4, Code-Controlling Structures, we used probe to get more details of a specific error, and this returned an output starting with make error! [ ... ]. The error! is effectively an object that was constructed with make.

It turns out that make can be used to construct a new value for any datatype. It needs the type and, as a second argument, a specification for that type. This can be a value or a memory allocation, or another specification in the case...