Julia Tutorial Part 1: Installations & Basics
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Introduction, Installations, and Basics
Julia is a open source programming language. It was designed from the beginning for high performance. Julia programs compile to efficient native code for multiple platforms via LLVM. To install it we need to download it’s binary from here. We are going to use Jupyter Notebook as the code editor. But to do that we need to link the Jupyter Notebook with Julia. After installing Julia, open the Julia Command prompt with administration rights. Then type the following code:
using Pkg
Pkg.add("IJulia")
These will integrate Julia environment with Jupyter Notebbok.
N.B: We are assuming that your system has already Jupyter notebook installed.
Julia file has .jl extensions. It’s time to write our first program. We will print Hello Julia!. The print function in julia is println.
input
println("Hello Julia!")
output
Hello Julia!
Congratulations! We have just run your first program in Julia.
Variables & Data Types
Julia support 5 basic data types.
- Integer
- Float
- String
- Character
- Boolean
We can easily declare a variable just assigining the value in it. We don’t need to give the datatype when declaring a variable. Also we can see what is the datatype of a variable by using typeof function. Lets see an example.
input
first = 1
println(typeof(first))
second = 22.0
println(typeof(second))
third = true
println(typeof(third))
fourth = "Hello World!"
println(typeof(fourth))
fifth = 'L'
println(typeof(fifth))
output
Int64
Float64
Bool
String
Char
String needs to be in double quotes or triple quotes. If we put String in single quote, it will show error. Only Character will be in single quote.
input
#This is an intenional error
strr = 'Hello world'
println(strr)
output
syntax: invalid character literal
Constant
To declare a constant we need to use const keyword. After defining a constant we can redefine it, but it will give us a warning. We only can redefine in the same datatype. Suppose: we created a constant with integer datatype with a value, so we can redefine it with another integer value though it will give a warning, but we can not redefine with another datatype. It will give an error.
input
const var1 = 2
println(var1)
var1 = 3
println(var1)
#this will give error
var1 = 4.9
println(var1)
output
2
3
WARNING: redefining constant var1
invalid redefinition of constant var1
Stacktrace:
[1] top-level scope at In[4]:5
Strings
As we have mentioned earlier, String needs to be in double or triple quotes.
mystr = "Hey this is a string"
mystr2 = """
this is a multiple line string
this string has 2 lines
"""
We can see the length of a string using the length function.
input
mystr = "Hey this is a string"
println(length(mystr))
output
20
Taking seperate characters from string
We can access seperate characters from the string using index. Here we need to keep in mind that, unlike other programming language, Julia access its first character from a string using index 1. Suppose in mystr we want access the first character H , so we need to access it using mystr[1]. Now, if we want to access the last character of a string we need to use the end keyword. So, in mystr the last character is g and we can access it by using mystr[end].
input
println(mystr[1])
println(mystr[end])
output
H
g
Substring
We also can get a substring from a string by slicing it. To do that we need to use : this. Suppose we want this as substring from mystr string. So, this started from index number 5 and ended in index number 8. Then we need to access it using mystr[5:8].
input
println(mystr[5:8])
output
this
String Concatenation
To concatenate one string with another we need to use * keyword. Suppose we have two strings. str1 = "Hello" and str2 = "World". We can merge them like this:
input
str1 = "Hello"
str2 = "World"
println(str1 * ", " * str2)
output
Hello, World
Thats it for this tutorial.
Good Luck, and May the Julia be with you!
Other posts in this series: