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 4. Understanding Types and Dispatch

Every programming language needs to understand the kind of data it is being supplied with. Types, often referred to as data types, are simply a classification of data that lets the computer know the differences between the kinds of input being provided by the user. Julia also uses a type system that uniquely identifies integers, strings, floats, Booleans, and other data types.

In this chapter, we will closely walk you through the extensive type system of Julia, and how just supplying the data type greatly enhances the overall speed of execution. Here is the list of topics that we will be covering in this chapter:

  • Julia's type system
  • Type annotations
  • More on types
  • Subtypes and supertypes
  • User-defined and composite data types
  • Inner constructors
  • Modules and interfaces
  • Module file paths
  • Multiple dispatch explained

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

  • Understand the various types in Julia and be able to supply them
  • Create new data types using the...