Solidity's code is encapsulated in contracts. A contract is the fundamental building block of Ethereum applications — all variables and functions belong to a contract, and this will be the starting point of all your projects.
An empty contract named HelloWorld would look like this:
contract HelloWorld {
}Version PragmaAll solidity source code should start with a "version pragma" — a declaration of the version of the Solidity compiler this code should use. This is to prevent issues with future compiler versions potentially introducing changes that would break your code.
For the scope of this tutorial, we'll want to be able to compile our smart contracts with any compiler version in the range of 0.5.0 (inclusive) to 0.6.0 (exclusive). It looks like this: pragma solidity >=0.5.0 <0.6.0;.
Putting it together, here is a bare-bones starting contract — the first thing you'll write every time you start a new project:
pragma solidity >=0.5.0 <0.6.0;
contract HelloWorld {
}Unsigned Integers: uintThe uint data type is an unsigned integer, meaning its value must be non-negative. There's also an int data type for signed integers.
Math in Solidity is pretty straightforward. The following operations are the same as in most programming languages:
- Addition:
x + y - Subtraction:
x - y, - Multiplication:
x * y - Division:
x / y - Modulus / remainder:
x % y (for example, 13 % 5 is 3, because if you divide 5 into 13, 3 is the remainder)
Sometimes you need a more complex data type. For this, Solidity provides structs:
struct Person {
uint age;
string name;
}Structs allow you to create more complicated data types that have multiple properties.
When you want a collection of something, you can use an array. There are two types of arrays in Solidity: fixed arrays and dynamic arrays:
// Array with a fixed length of 2 elements:
uint[2] fixedArray;
// another fixed Array, can contain 5 strings:
string[5] stringArray;
// a dynamic Array - has no fixed size, can keep growing:
uint[] dynamicArray;
You can also create an array of structs.
Person[] people; // dynamic Array, we can keep adding to it
Remember that state variables are stored permanently in the blockchain? So creating a dynamic array of structs like this can be useful for storing structured data in your contract, kind of like a database.
Public Arrays
You can declare an array as public, and Solidity will automatically create a getter method for it. The syntax looks like:
Person[] public people;
Other contracts would then be able to read from, but not write to, this array. So this is a useful pattern for storing public data in your contract.
A function declaration in solidity looks like the following:
function eatHamburgers(string memory _name, uint _amount) public {
}This is a function named eatHamburgers that takes 2 parameters: a string and a uint. For now the body of the function is empty. Note that we're specifying the function visibility as public. We're also providing instructions about where the _name variable should be stored- in memory. This is required for all reference types such as arrays, structs, mappings, and strings.
What is a reference type you ask?
Well, there are two ways in which you can pass an argument to a Solidity function:
- By value, which means that the Solidity compiler creates a new copy of the parameter's value and passes it to your function. This allows your function to modify the value without worrying that the value of the initial parameter gets changed.
- By reference, which means that your function is called with a... reference to the original variable. Thus, if your function changes the value of the variable it receives, the value of the original variable gets changed.
struct Person {
uint age;
string name;
}
Person[] public people;
create new Persons and add them to our people array.
// create a New Person:
Person satoshi = Person(172, "Satoshi");
// Add that person to the Array:
people.push(satoshi);
We can also combine these together and do them in one line of code to keep things clean:
people.push(Person(16, "Vitalik"));
Note that array.push() adds something to the end of the array, so the elements are in the order we added them. See the following example:
uint[] numbers;
numbers.push(5);
numbers.push(10);
numbers.push(15);
// numbers is now equal to [5, 10, 15]
In Solidity, functions are public by default. This means anyone (or any other contract) can call your contract's function and execute its code.Obviously this isn't always desirable, and can make your contract vulnerable to attacks. Thus it's good practice to mark your functions as private by default, and then only make public the functions you want to expose to the world.
Let's look at how to declare a private function:
uint[] numbers;
function _addToArray(uint _number) private {
numbers.push(_number);
}
This means only other functions within our contract will be able to call this function and add to the numbers array.
As you can see, we use the keyword private after the function name.
Return Values
To return a value from a function, the declaration looks like this:
string greeting = "What's up dog";
function sayHello() public returns (string memory) {
return greeting;
}
In Solidity, the function declaration contains the type of the return value (in this case string).
Function modifiers
The above function doesn't actually change state in Solidity — e.g. it doesn't change any values or write anything.
So in this case we could declare it as a view function, meaning it's only viewing the data but not modifying it:
function sayHello() public view returns (string memory) {
Solidity also contains pure functions, which means you're not even accessing any data in the app. Consider the following:
function _multiply(uint a, uint b) private pure returns (uint) {
return a * b;
}
This function doesn't even read from the state of the app — its return value depends only on its function parameters. So in this case we would declare the function as pure.
Note: It may be hard to remember when to mark functions as pure/view. Luckily the Solidity compiler is good about issuing warnings to let you know when you should use one of these modifiers.
