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

Inner constructors


Till now, we have seen how to use Julia's predefined types as well as user-defined composite types. Now, we are going to delve a little deeper into learning what happens when a user-defined type gets created, and the applications of making this feature more useful to the end user.

As we have already discussed, when we create a new type, we may or may not include field names in the body. Functions, on the other hand, remain distant, and unlike other object-oriented languages, the methods aren't present.

So when we create a new type's object, the default constructor comes into action:

julia> type Family
       num_members :: Int64
       members :: Array{String, 1}
       end

julia> f1 = Family(2, ["husband", "wife"])
Family(2, String["husband", "wife"])

We have declared a composite type, Family, and it has two fields, num_members and members. The first field name is for declaring the number of family members, and the second field name explicitly calls out all family...