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

Anonymous functions


Anonymous functions are shorthand notations for regular functions. These are the choice of code when a function has to be used only a limited number of times, hence, it may be slightly easier and quicker to have them rather than using named functions. In popular terms, they are also sometimes referred to as lambda functions.

To relate to the preceding sentence, just think of a scenario wherein you want to apply a functionality over a list of values using a map() function. Instead of writing down a full-fledged function, we can just define them in an easy way without even bothering about giving them a name!

In Julia, we define an anonymous function using the following syntax:

f -> 2f

The syntax uses -> to notify that we are defining an anonymous function here. However, it should be kept in mind that anonymous functions themselves have no use, as they don't have a name, hence cannot be called from anywhere in the code:

julia> f ->2f
(::#1) (generic function with...