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

The bitset! datatype

This datatype was made specifically so that parse could work efficiently with strings consisting of Unicode values. It is used to store an arbitrary set of characters as Boolean values, that is, as a set of bits.

A value of the bitset! type is created with make bitset!, accepting a character, string, an integer (within the Unicode codepoint range), or a series of these values, such as these:

;-- see Chapter08/bitsets.red:
make
bitset! #"R" ;== make bitset! #{0000000000000000000020}
make bitset! "Red" ;== make bitset! #{0000000000000000000020000C}
make bitset! [108 "Red" #"R"] ;== make bitset! #{0000000000000000000020000C08}

Note that a bitset value is represented in hexadecimal format. A convenient shortcut function that does the same thing is charset. So, for example, the last line could also...