Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

http://processing.org/. My main objective therefore is to briefly describe the overall
organization of the API and emphasize certain key issues. The rest of the book focuses on
code experiments that contextually move throughout the entire API, including some of the
core code libraries, which I’ll say more about at the end of this reference.
The complete (extended) API is segmented into 15 sections, which are further divided into
45 subsections, with nearly 300 separate items, including functions, operators, constants,
system variables, data types, and control structures. The 15 main sections are titled as
follows:
Structure
Structure
Environment
Data
Control
Shape
Input
Output
Transform
Lights, Camera
Color
Image
Rendering
Typography
Math
Constants
The nearly 30 items organized within the Structure section range from basic syntactic
symbols—such as comment structures ( // and /* */), parentheses, semicolons, and array
brackets—to reserved language keywords, such as “class,” “this,” “true,” “super,” and
“extends.” In addition, there are the Processing function calls setup(), size(), noLoop(),
delay(), exit(), draw(), loop(), and redraw().
Structural elements in a programming language are used to organize the process of
coding—a semicolon terminates a line, a dot connects an object to its properties and
methods, curly braces ({ }) organize a block of code, and so forth. Structure allows you to
build, in a sense, sentences and stories with your code to visualize and express your ideas.
I cover the concept of structure as it relates to general programming theory/practice in
more detail in Chapter 3.
PROCESSING LANGUAGE API
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