I'm trying to do a really basic problem in clojure and having some trouble wrapping my head around how vectors/lists work.
First off when I am defining the arguments of a function that has a vector as an argument, how do you represent that as an argument.
Would you just have it as a single variable say
(defn example [avector] (This is where the function goes) )
Or do you have to list each element of a vector or list beforehand?
(defn example [vectorpart1 vectorpart2 vectorpart3 vectorpart4 ] (This is where the function goes) )
Also, in terms of vectors and lists, does anyone know of commands that allow you to figure out the length of a vector or get the first/last/or nth element?
To remove the element at index n from vector v:
(defn remove-indexed [v n]
(into (subvec v 0 n) (subvec v (inc n))))
For example,
(remove-indexed (vec (range 10)) 5)
;[0 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9]
Lots can go wrong:
v might not be a vector.
n might not be a whole number.
n might be out of range for v (we require (contains? v n).
Clojure detects all these errors at run time. A statically typed language would detect 1 and 2 but not 3 at compile time.
Your first example defines a function that takes a single argument, regardless of type. If you pass a vector then that argument will be set to a vector.
(example [1 2 3 4]) ;; (= avector [1 2 3 4])
Your second example defines a function which takes four arguments. You need to pass four separate values for calls to this function to be valid.
(example [1] [2] [3] [4])
;; (= vectorpart1 [1])
;; (= vectorpart2 [2])
;; (= vectorpart3 [3])
;; (= vectorpart4 [4])
It sounds like you might be thinking about the destructuring syntax, which allows you to destructure values directly from an argument vector.
(defn example [[a b c d]]
())
The literal vector syntax in the argument definition describes a mapping between the items in the first argument and symbols available in the function scope.
(example [1 2 3 4])
;; (= a 1)
;; (= b 2)
;; (= c 3)
;; (= d 4)
The other function that also sits in this space is apply. Apply takes a list or vector of arguments and calls a function with them in-place.
(defn example [a b c]
(assert (= a 1))
(assert (= b 2))
(assert (= c 3)))
If we call this function with one vector, you'll get an arity exception.
(example [1 2 3])
;; ArityException Wrong number of args (1) passed ...
Instead we can use apply to pass the vector as arguments.
(apply example [1 2 3])
;; no errors!
You'll find all the methods you need to work with vectors in the Clojure docs.
If you want to remove a specific element, simply take the elements before it and the elements after it, then join them together.
(def v [1 2 3])
(concat (subvec v 0 1) (subvec v 2))
The short answer is that your first example is correct. You don't want to have to name every piece of your vector because you will commonly work with vectors of indeterminate length. If you want to do something with that vector where you need its parts to be assigned, you can do so by destructuring.
The slightly longer answer is that the list of parameters sent into any clojure defn already is a vector. Notice that the parameter list uses [] to wrap its list of args. This is because in Clojure code and data are the same thing. From this article...
Lisps are homoiconic, meaning code written in the language is encoded as data structures that the language has tools to manipulate.
This might be more than you're looking for but it's an important related concept.
Here'a a quick example to get you going... Pass a vector (of strings in this case) to a functions and it returns the vector. If you map over it however, it passes the contents of the vector to the function in succession.
user=> (def params ["bar" "baz"])
#'user/params
user=> (defn foo [params] (println params))
#'user/foo
user=> (foo params)
[bar baz]
nil
user=> (map foo params)
bar
baz
(nil nil)
Additionally, look at the Clojure cheatsheet to find more about things you can do with vectors (and everything else in Clojure).
Related
I feel curious about clojure's lazy sequence. In REPL, I defined a variable foo:
user> (def foo (map println [1 2 3]))
#'user/foo
At the first time evaluating foo, it seems to work:
user> foo
1
2
3
(nil nil nil)
But after the first time, why it becomes lazy?
user> foo
(nil nil nil)
println is not a pure function, what you're seeing in the first time you evaluate foo is the side effect of println. When you evaluate foo for the second time println is not called again, because the result of (map println [1 2 3]) is cached.
And you can see that map is lazy because when you defined foo nothing gets printed in the console. Only when evaluating foo something is printed.
Please see Laziness in Clojure.
If you use a pure function like inc:
(def foo (map inc [1 2 3]))
> foo
(2 3 4)
> foo
(2 3 4)
The result is always the same without any side effects. map, filter, etc in Clojure are designed to be used with pure functions but the language doesn't forbid you from using them with functions with side effects. In Haskell, for example you can't even write an equivalent expression, the code won't compile.
Collections hold values. The value returned by println is nil. The side-effect of println is to make something show up on your screen.
The values created by mapping println are stored in your var. This is a lazy-seq of nil values, which were returned by println.
Just to elaborate on your question.
println is only having a side effect on the *out* stream which is bound by default to the standard output.
You can have both the printing and some value returned from the function you map, e.g.
user> (defn print-and-inc [n]
(do
(println "called with n= " n)
(inc n)))
#'user/print-and-inc
do will execute each expression in sequence and return the result of the last, (inc n) in this case.
If you define now foo as a mapping of print-and-inc over a vector of int
user> (def foo (map print-and-inc [1 2 3 4 5]))
#'user/foo
user>
user> foo
called with n= 1
called with n= 2
called with n= 3
called with n= 4
called with n= 5
(2 3 4 5 6)
user>
user> foo
(2 3 4 5 6)
And you see the lazyness of map, since the printing occurs only the first time foo is called. But now foo holds the results which are the incremented values of the initial collection.
Note : this can be used to log/trace infos into your code, but there is a standard library tools.logging
In addition to what has been pointed out by others, note that experimenting with laziness within the repl is a little problematic. Lazy sequences don't actually have values until they are realised by some action that uses the value. The repl has an implicit doall to do this when printing results. This means the sequence is often realised when your using it in the repl, but may not be when using it in your real code. When you run your code, you get an unexpected result because the sequence has not been realised at a point where you expected it to be because the repl implicit doall has not been called. As an example of how this can cause moments of confusion, have a look at http://nicksellen.co.uk/2013/10/26/clojure-lazy-repl.html
I'm using the http-kit library to make some webcalls and it returns a promise for each.
When I try to deref any of the promises in the vector I get the following error
ArityException Wrong number of args (1) passed to: core/eval5473/fn--5474 clojure.lang.AFn.throwArity (AFn.ja
va:429)
Simplest way to reproduce in a repl without http-kit is as follows
Create collection
(def x [ [1 (promise)] [2 (promise)] [3 (promise)]])
Simple Test
(map first x)
;user=> (1 2 3)
My Test
(map #(vector % #%2) x)
;user=> ArityException Wrong number of args (1) passed to: user/eval109/fn--110 clojure.lang.AFn.throwArity (AFn.java
:429)
Update
I should probably delete this question. The problem had nothing to do with promises as Valentin noted below.
I was typing %2 and thinking second argument. When what i needed was #(second %). i.e second entry in first and only argument.
The function that is the second argument of map must accept only 1 argument in this case (which is meant to be an element of the seq that is being walked through).
You seem to be mistaking passing 2 arguments to a function and passing 1 argument that is a vector of 2 elements.
What you want to write is
(map (fn [[a b]] (vector a #b)) x)
...whereas what you're currently writing is equivalent to:
(map (fn [a b] (vector a #b)) x)
So this is not a problem about promises in fact.
In clojure, I would like to apply a function to all the elements of a sequence and return a map with the results where the keys are the elements of the sequence and the values are the elements of the mapped sequence.
I have written the following function function. But I am wondering why such a function is not part of clojure. Maybe it's not idiomatic?
(defn map-to-object[f lst]
(zipmap lst (map f lst)))
(map-to-object #(+ 2 %) [1 2 3]) => {1 3, 2 4, 3 5}
Your function is perfectly idiomatic.
For a fn to be part of core, I think it has to be useful to most people. What is part of the core language and what is not is quite debatable. Just think about the amount of StringUtils classes that you can find in Java.
My comments were going to get too long winded, so...
Nothing wrong with your code whatsoever.
You might also see (into {} (map (juxt identity f) coll))
One common reason for doing this is to cache the results of a function over some inputs.
There are other use-cases for what you have done, e.g. when a hash-map is specifically needed.
If and only if #3 happens to be your use case, then memoize does this for you.
If the function is f, and the resultant map is m then (f x) and (m x) have the same value in the domain. However, the values of (m x) have been precalculated, in other words, memoized.
Indeed memoize does exactly the same thing behind the scene, it just doesn't give direct access to the map. Here's a tiny modification to the source of memoize to see this.
(defn my-memoize
"Exactly the same as memoize but the cache memory atom must
be supplied as an argument."
[f mem]
(fn [& args]
(if-let [e (find #mem args)]
(val e)
(let [ret (apply f args)]
(swap! mem assoc args ret)
ret))))
Now, to demonstrate
(defn my-map-to-coll [f coll]
(let [m (atom {})
g (my-memoize f m)]
(doseq [x coll] (g x))
#m))
And, as in your example
(my-map-to-coll #(+ 2 %) [1 2 3])
;=> {(3) 5, (2) 4, (1) 3}
But note that the argument(s) are enclosed in a sequence as memoize handles multiple arity functions as well.
Basically, I need to do something like map, but instead of applying a function to all elements in a collection, I need to apply the same (set of) value(s) to a collection of functions (does this operation have a name?). This might seem like a simple question, but I haven't found an idiomatic way to do it in Clojure. For the special case where I need to apply only one value to each function, for example, I have used
(for [f funs] (f value))
where value is, of course, the value I need each function to take as an argument, and funs is the collection of functions which need to be called with value as the argument.
My question is, then, is there a function in Clojure that does this, but is also generalised for arbitrary numbers of arguments? Or is the above indeed idiomatic Clojure?
You're looking for juxt
juxt
Takes a set of functions and returns a fn that is the juxtaposition
of those fns. The returned fn takes a variable number of args, and
returns a vector containing the result of applying each fn to the
args (left-to-right).
((juxt a b c) x) => [(a x) (b x) (c x)]
From a section of CLOJURE for the BRAVE and TRUE
Another fun thing you can do with map is pass it a collection of
functions. You could use this if you wanted to perform a set of
calculations on different collections of numbers, like so:
(def sum #(reduce + %))
(def avg #(/ (sum %) (count %)))
(defn stats
[numbers]
(map #(% numbers) [sum count avg]))
(stats [3 4 10])
; => (17 3 17/3)
(stats [80 1 44 13 6])
; => (144 5 144/5)
What is the "simplest"/shortest way to ensure a var is a vector? Self-written it could look like
(defn ensure-vector [x]
(if (vector? x)
x
(vector x))
(ensure-vector {:foo "bar"})
;=> [{:foo "bar"}]
But I wonder if there is already a core function that does this? Many of them (seq, vec, vector, list) either fail on maps or always apply.
I also wonder what would be the best name for this function. box, singleton, unit, v, cast-vector, to-vector, ->vector, !vector, vector!, vec!?
I further wonder if other languages, like Haskell, have this function built-in.
I think the function you want to use when the value is a collection is vec which turns any collection into a vector. The vector function receives the items of the resulting vector as its arguments, so you could use it when the value is neither a vector or a collection.
This is a possible approach:
(defn as-vector [x]
(cond
(vector? x) x
(sequential? x) (vec x)
:else (vector x)))
(map as-vector [[1] #{2 3} 1 {:a 1}])
I chose the name for the function based on the ones from the Coercions protocol in clojure.java.io (as-file and as-url).