Representation of a Julia program

In this section, you will study the life of a Julia program and how it is actually represented and interpreted by Julia. You will also learn what is meant by "a language expressing its own code as a data structure of itself."

This section will act as a foundation for learning about the concept of metaprogramming and how Julia uses it for generating code.

Getting ready

To get started with this section, you must simply have your Julia REPL up-and-running.

How to do it...

Firstly, it is very important to know that every Julia program starts out as a string. Let's consider a short program for adding two variables as our Julia code and use it to learn how Julia interprets programs:

code = "a + b"

It would look like this:

Now, if you parse the preceding string code, it would return an object of type Expression. Let's check it by actually parsing an example Julia program and checking for its type:

check = parse(code)

The output would...