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

Loading and saving files

Red also has the save and load words, that can be used interchangeably with write and read. However, save and load are generally used to store more complex data structures, and in particular to store and load Red code. But we already know that in Red, code can be treated as data.

To see for yourself that save and load can be used for data, answer question 4 in the Questions section.

The save word can also be used to write data into a string or binary value.

In particular, if you have a file with data items separated by a space, load will transform that into a series with the items. Suppose we have a names file with the following contents:

"John" "Dave" "Jane" "Bob" "Sue" "Sarah" "Mikhail" "Rudolf" "Nenad"

If we use load to read in that file, we get the following:

...