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

Code is data and data is code

Now we come back to the powerful introspective and metaprogramming features of Red—namely, how Red can work with code in the same way as data.

Using reflection on functions

Functions are first-class objects in Red. You can give your own functions, or even built-in ones, another name, as shown here:

;-- see Chapter06/reflection-functions.red:
pr: :print ;== make native! [[
pr ["Hello" "Red"] ;== Hello Red

The : prevents the function from executing; pr: get 'print does the same thing.

This shows Red's flexibility and power; not only changing the name, but even changing the meaning of built-in words is possible. As always, with great power comes...