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

Multiple dispatch


Before we dive deep into the topic, let's just ask ourselves a quick question. What does dispatch mean? To come up with an answer in the easiest of terms, we can say that dispatch means to send!

In programming terms, dispatch means to send a message to a listener or a call to a function. Basically, to send a piece of data (or packet of information) to code that is ready to handle it.

Dispatch can be of many different types. Starting off with a few of them we have:

  • Static dispatch: The dispatch order can be defined at compile time. Essentially, in static dispatch, all types are already known before the execution of the program. Compiler is able to generate specific code for every possible combination of datatypes and know in advance when and where they will be used. This is one of the most common in most languages. To break it down, if we have a place in the code where the function or a method is called using funct() or perhaps x.funct(), then that very same function will be...