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

Interacting with the operating system

Some of the things you must be able to do when writing apps include getting information at startup, starting up a different program from within your app, and using the OS clipboard. Here, we'll show you how this is done in Red.

Getting input from command-line arguments

Command-line arguments are captured in the system/script/args word. It is one string in which all arguments are stored, separated by a space:

;-- see Chapter10/args.red:
print
system/script/args ;== "78 A Red"
type? system/script/args ;== string!
args: split system/script/args " " ;== ["78" "A" "Red"]
print ["Number of command-line arguments:&quot...