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

Some common datatypes

Red has many predefined datatypes. A developer can work just as easily with often-used data such as files, images, emails, and URLs, by using the same actions and functions. You can see a list of the available types in the console by typing ? datatype!. Here are some examples (see Chapter03/common-datatypes.red):

  • integer! such as -42.
  • float! such as 1.23 or 1.23e12; the European format 1,23 is also recognized; integers are signed 32 bits (4 bytes), floats are 64 bit.
  • logic! such as true or false, but also on or off and yes or no, better known as Boolean values.
  • char! such as #"a", which are Unicode code points in the integer range hexadecimal 00 to 10FFFF.
  • string! such as "Red is awesome". To work with multiline strings or strings that contain "", enclose them within { }, such as {She said "Hi"}.
  • time! such as 20:05...