Red (programming language)

Red
	Red's design (click to enlarge)
Paradigm	imperative, functional, symbolic
Designed by	Nenad Rakočević
Developer	Nenad Rakočević
First appeared	2011
Stable release	0.6.6 (Beta) / March 19, 2025
OS	Linux, Windows, OS X, Syllable
License	modified BSD and Boost
Filename extensions	.red, .reds
Website	www.red-lang.org
Influenced by
	Rebol, Lisp, Scala, Lua

Red is a programming language made to improve upon the older Rebol programming language.^[3] It can be used for both high and low level programming.^[4] Red was created by Nenad Rakočević in 2011.^[1]

Some technical details

Red has two parts, Red/System and Red:^[5]

Red/System is a lower language that has a similar purpose to C, but uses a different syntax.

Red is a higher language and interpreted, used for general-purpose tasks.

The language is able to cross-compile.^[5] Red applications can run on many different operating systems. At this time, Red applications are 32-bit, but it is planned to switch to 64-bit in the future. Red uses a garbage collector "the Simple GC".^[6]

Examples

Here is a hello world program in Red.

Hello World!

Red [Title: "Simple hello world script"]
print "Hello World!"

Here is an example of using a variable:

To bind a word to a value, use a colon.

Red []

name: "John"
print name

Here are examples of conditionals in Red.

>> if 10 > 5 [print "large"]
large

>> unless 10 > 5 [print "large"]
== none

>> unless 5 > 10 [print "large"]
large

>> either 10 > 5 [print "bigger"] [print "smaller"]
bigger

>> either 5 > 10 [print "bigger"] [print "smaller"]
smaller