This chapter marks the end of our overview of some of the more unusual features of the Julia language. We have discussed the way Julia can interface directly with routines written in C and Fortran and how it is possible to use modules from other programming languages such as Python, R, and Java.

Further, we looked at the homoiconity nature of Julia and how this leads to the ability to define genuine runtime macros.

Finally, we introduced the running of separate tasks and pipelining and how the use of macros creates boilerplate code to greatly simplify the execution of the code on parallel processors.

In the subsequent chapters, we will be looking at individual topics that are of particular interest to analysts and data scientists, with a discussion of the I/O system and how to process data stored in disk files.