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

The subtypes and supertypes


Julia's type system is organized into a clean hierarchy of data types. Some of the data types sit above other data types, and vice versa. This, however, should not be confused with the precedence of types, as we are not talking about that here. Rather, our focus is mainly to understand how Julia's type system organized itself into a tree structure.

To start with, the starting point of all data types in Julia is the Any datatype. The Any type is like the parent node of the tree, and all the other possible data types are directly or indirectly its child nodes.

Following is Julia's type hierarchy (sample):

                               Any
                                |
            ---------------------------------------------                                           
          Number                                  AbstractString
            |                                           |
    --------------------------------                    |
Complex       ...