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

Function attributes

In this section, we will learn about giving arguments a type, how to return values from a function, how to define refinements, how to document a function, and how to do error-handling with functions.

Passing arguments

Here, we must make a distinction between single, so called scalar! values, such as numbers, dates, chars, and so on (See The type system section in Chapter 3, Using Words, Values, and Types), and all other values:

  • Scalar values are passed by value, which means that a copy of the value is sent to the function
  • Other values are passed by reference, which means that a reference to the value is sent to the function

The consequence of this is that scalar values cannot be changed by a function...