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Julia 1.0 Programming

You're reading from   Julia 1.0 Programming Dynamic and high-performance programming to build fast scientific applications

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Product type Paperback
Published in Sep 2018
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781788999090
Length 196 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
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Author (1):
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Ivo Balbaert Ivo Balbaert
Author Profile Icon Ivo Balbaert
Ivo Balbaert
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Table of Contents (12) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Installing the Julia Platform FREE CHAPTER 2. Variables, Types, and Operations 3. Functions 4. Control Flow 5. Collection Types 6. More on Types, Methods, and Modules 7. Metaprogramming in Julia 8. I/O, Networking, and Parallel Computing 9. Running External Programs 10. The Standard Library and Packages 11. Other Books You May Enjoy

Evaluation and interpolation


With the definition of type Expr from the preceding section, we can also build expressions directly from the constructor for Expr. For example: e1 = Expr(:call, *, 3, 4) returns :((*)(3, 4)) (follow along with the code in Chapter 7\eval.jl).

The result of an expression can be computed with the eval function, eval(e1), which returns 12 in this case. At the time an expression is constructed, not all the symbols have to be defined, but they have to be defined at the time of evaluation, otherwise an error occurs.

For example, e2 = Expr(:call, *, 3, :a) returns :((*)(3, a)), and eval(e2) then gives ERROR: UndefVarError: a not defined. Only after we say, for example, a = 4 does eval(e2) return 12.

Expressions can also change the state of the execution environment, for example, the expression e3 = :(b = 1) assigns a value to b when evaluated, and even defines b, if it doesn't exist already.

 

To make writing expressions a bit simpler, we can use the $ operator to do interpolation...

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