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

A fauna of functions

Red's built-in functions can be categorized as follows. The type is indicated within ():

  • operators (op!), which can be used with infix notation, such as a + b, a / b, and so on.
  • native (native!) functions, such as if, either, while, throw, all, wait, and so on; you can see a complete list by using ? op! in the console.
  • routine (routine!) functions, such as exists?, write-clipboard, and so on; you can see a list using ? routine! It is also used in Red to define a function that calls a Red/System function (see Chapter 10, Advanced Red).
  • action (action!) functions, such as copy, move, clear, to, form, and so on; you can see a complete list using ? action!

The native, routine, and action functions are written in Red/System. Action functions are special in that they are polymorphic—they are defined for more than one datatype. Which action code is...