Book Image

Learning Julia

By : Anshul Joshi, Rahul Lakhanpal
Book Image

Learning Julia

By: Anshul Joshi, Rahul Lakhanpal

Overview of this book

Julia is a highly appropriate language for scientific computing, but it comes with all the required capabilities of a general-purpose language. It allows us to achieve C/Fortran-like performance while maintaining the concise syntax of a scripting language such as Python. It is perfect for building high-performance and concurrent applications. From the basics of its syntax to learning built-in object types, this book covers it all. 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 Julia to explore its wide and ever-growing package ecosystem and also for experienced developers/statisticians/data scientists who want to add Julia to their skill-set. The book presents the fundamentals of programming in Julia and in-depth informative examples, using a step-by-step approach. You will be taken through concepts and examples such as doing simple mathematical operations, creating loops, metaprogramming, functions, collections, multiple dispatch, and so on. By the end of the book, you will be able to apply your skills in Julia to create and explore applications of any domain.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Data Visualization and Graphics

More on types


Abstract data types are the ones that cannot be instantiated. They serve as the basic pillars of the type system in Julia. Or, in other words, other types inside Julia can inherit any one of these base types. Examples of abstract data types are Number, Integer, and Signed.

Julia supports all the basic data types, along with the ability to add in new user-defined data types as well as composite types. The way they are prioritized is something that we will learn about in the next section when we read about subtypes and supertypes.

Before we begin talking about the different data types in detail, I want to share three simple functions that we will be using to know more about types:

  • typeof(): This is used to tell the type of data being supplied to it
  • typemax(): This is used to know the maximum value supported by the specific type
  • typemin(): This is used to know the minimum value supported by the specific type

As we are now moving into a territory wherein our machine bits would start...