Function reduce1 in clojure? - clojure

Is reduce1 not in the clojure.core? I am using Emacs with CIDER and i don't have reduce1, (doc reduce1) returns nil.

reduce1 is a private reduce function used in Clojure's bootstrapping of clojure.core. It is needed because some of the things that reduce need to work haven't been loaded yet. You shouldn't use reduce1 in your own code, always prefer reduce.

The function is defined in line 895 of clojure.core, but marked private, and later redefined as plain reduce.

Related

Get calling function name in Clojure

I need to get calling function name in Clojure. Something like combination of macro's implicit variable &form and *file* var. I need to get or infer function name from those variable or something else if possible. Will have to be non platform specific.
This function already exists in the Tupelo library. There are two functions that are thin wrappers over tupelo.misc/stacktrace-info
fn-info
fn-info-caller
They return a map of info about the current function (or its parent), like:
{:ns-name 'demo.core'
:fn-name 'add2'
:class-name 'demo.core$add2'
:file-name 'core.clj'
:line-num 57
:method-name 'invokeStatic' }
I think you will have to use the platform-specific
(-> (Throwable.) .getStackTrace) in java
and
(-> (js/Error.) .-stack) in js and work it out from those sadly.
I don't think there's anything platform agnostic.

How to test if a symbol points to a special form or a macro

I need a function that can tell whether a symbol is pointing to a special form or a macro.
I found the function? function in the clojure.test namespace, so could use that, but I'm hesitant to use it because it seems to be intended only for testing purposes. Is it okay to use it for normal code? If not, how can I accomplish my goal.
As noted the comments, fn? does not work because it only works on functions themselves, not the symbols that point to them.
If it does what you want, use it. It's in clojure.test because it wasn't expected to be useful for non-test code, but if it's the best function for your particular use case, there's no reason to hamper yourself just because of where the function is located. In other words, clojure.test is separate from clojure.core for organization, not because it should only ever be used for tests.
you can find all special form, :-)
(defn special-symbol?
[s]
(contains? (. clojure.lang.Compiler specials) s))

What namespaces Clojure uses for def-ing

According to spec, def should intern the var in the current ns (i.e. *ns*). However, the following code does not look anything like it:
(ns namespace-b)
(defn def_something []
(ns namespace-a)
(println *ns*) ;prints namespace-a as it should
(def something 1)
)
(def_something)
(println namespace-b/something) ; prints 1
(println namespace-a/something) ; throws
What am I missing?
Notes:
defn is used just for clarity. Defining and running anonymous function works just as well.
I know that using def inside function is probably not very idiomatic. However, this is just extracted essence of a bigger problem I ran into.
The parser already interns the var to the current namespace at compile time, although it won't be bound immediately:
(defn dd [] (def x 0))
x ;; => #<Unbound Unbound: #'user/x>
The relevant piece of code can be found here, with the second parameter to lookupVar triggering the aforementioned interning for non-existing vars here.
The parses then generates an expression that references the previously created var, so the expression logic never leaves the current namespace.
TL;DR: def is something that the compiler handles in a special kind of way.
The key thing to understand about def is that it is a macro. This means that it does not resolve the namespace or create the binding at runtime, but beforehand, while the code is being compiled.
If you call a function that calls def, that call to def was already resolved to use the namespace in which the function was defined. Similarly, if you call functions inside a function body, the functions to call are resolved at compile time within the namespace where that function was defined.
If you want to generally bind values to namespaces at runtime, you should use the function intern, which lets you explicitly set the namespace to mutate.
All this said, namespace mutation is just that, it's procedural and is not thread safe and does not have nice declarative semantics like other options Clojure makes available. I would strongly suggest finding a way to express your solution that does not involve unsafe runtime mutation.

General syntax of multimethods

I apologize if the question is trivial, but some googling is not leading me anywhere. What is the general syntax of defmulti and defmethod? I can write simple multimethods, but I am not sure where I can put the docstring, pre and post conditions, metadata and so on.
I am actually interested in ClojureScript more than in Clojure, so if there are differences between the two, please tell me.
In a REPL you can use the doc function to get the function arguments and (most of the time) an explanation of the options. As for ClojureScript, these two functions are macros, which means they are expanded at compile time and should behave exactly as they do in regular Clojure. That is, as long as ClojureScript can handle the code the macro generates.
user=> (doc defmulti)
-------------------------
clojure.core/defmulti
([name docstring? attr-map? dispatch-fn & options])
Macro
Creates a new multimethod with the associated dispatch function.
The docstring and attribute-map are optional.
Options are key-value pairs and may be one of:
:default the default dispatch value, defaults to :default
:hierarchy the isa? hierarchy to use for dispatching
defaults to the global hierarchy
nil
user=> (doc defmethod)
-------------------------
clojure.core/defmethod
([multifn dispatch-val & fn-tail])
Macro
Creates and installs a new method of multimethod associated with dispatch-value.
nil
At Clojuredocs: defmulti, defmethod.
If you don't find the examples there detailed enough, you might consider adding your own (once you've gotten all your questions answered).

How is 'provided' implemented in a fact in Midje?

I was reading Clojure in Action chapter 8 about TDD and experimented with the stubbing macro. It uses the dynamic binding mechanism to stub functions. Alas, in Clojure 1.3 it is not possible to use the binding mechanism for non-dynamic vars, so the stubbing macro doesn't work in most cases, unless you explicitly declare the var which points to a function dynamic. Then I wondered how stubbing is done in Midje and tried to find the source for 'provided', but I couldn't find it. So here it goes:
How is 'provided' implemented in a fact in Midje? Can someone explain this in detail?
Clojure 1.3 provides a with-redefs macro that works even with vars that haven't been declared dynamic:
user=> (def this-is-not-dynamic)
user=> (with-redefs [this-is-not-dynamic 900] this-is-not-dynamic)
900
For backward compatibility, Midje uses its own version, whose guts look like this:
(defn alter-one-root [[variable new-value]]
(if (bound? variable)
(let [old-value (deref variable)]
(alter-var-root variable (fn [current-value] new-value))
[variable old-value])
(do
(.bindRoot variable new-value)
[variable unbound-marker])))