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

Working interactively in the Red console

Like any dynamic language, Red has a REPL console. The red command without arguments (open or double-click red.bat) starts a graphical window console on Windows and macOS, and a command-line console on Linux. If you need a command-line console on Windows and macOS, just use the command red --cli.

The console is a full Red interpreter and expects the input of Red code after the >> prompt, to evaluate and then execute it when pressing Enter. It's a live interaction with the language. Simply giving it a value (here a string indicated by "") returns that value after the ==:

;-- see Chapter02/console-examples.red:
>> "Red is awesome"
== "Red is awesome"

(You can find the source code of these examples in ch2/console-examples.red. In all code files, we'll indicate the returned output with a ;=...