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

Chapter 3. Functions in Julia

Functions form an integral part of any programming language because they increase code modularity, as well as making the code much more readable than unorganized non-function code. Julia is no different, as it also provides functions as part of the built-in library, along with the ability to add in user-defined functions.

This chapter is divided into different sections, with each section talking in detail about itself and providing you with a good stronghold. A list of the things covered in this chapter is provided as follows, which acts as a quick reference for you to go through:

  • Creating functions
  • Function arguments
  • Anonymous functions
  • Multiple dispatch
  • Recursion
  • Built-in functions

After going through this chapter, you will be able to:

  • Create and define functions inside Julia REPL as well as independent Julia scripts
  • Clearly understand and differentiate between various argument passing methods and their usage
  • Create recursive functions, along with having a good understanding...