Book Image

Learn Red ? Fundamentals of Red

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Learn Red ? Fundamentals of Red

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

A key problem of software development today is software bloat, where huge toolchains and development environments are needed in software coding and deployment. Red significantly reduces this bloat by offering a minimalist but complete toolchain. This is the first introductory book about it, and it will get you up and running with Red as quickly as possible. 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 Red to explore its wide and ever-growing package ecosystem and also for experienced developers who want to add Red to their skill set. The book presents the fundamentals of programming in Red and in-depth informative examples using a step-by-step approach. You will be taken through concepts and examples such as doing simple metaprogramming, functions, collections, GUI applications, and more. By the end of the book, you will be fully equipped to start your own projects in Red.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
11
Assessments

Reactive programming

In Chapter 9, Composing Visual Interfaces, we saw how easy it is to handle events on widgets by attaching actor code blocks. We encountered several examples where a change or action in one face influenced another face—for example, clicking a button changes a text in a field. The text field reacted to the button because we explicitly coded an actor on the button.

Look at the following code snippet:

;-- see Chapter10/reactive1.red:
point: [x: 3 y: 5]
distance: square-root (point/x ** 2) + (point/y ** 2)
print distance ;== 5.8309518948453
point/x: 2
print distance ;== 5.8309518948453 <-- doesn't change!
distance: square-root (point/x ** 2) + (point/y ** 2)
print distance ;== 5.385164807134504 <-- changed

The distance word gives the distance of point to the origin, but when the point's coordinates change, distance does not change...