notes-computer-programming-programmingLanguageDesign-prosAndCons-variadicFnVsImplicitPartialApplication

" djhworld 450 days ago

Just reading the Shen example has made me question my choice of learning Clojure, with the simple example of partial application.

I dream for the day when you can just do (map (* 2) [1 2 3]) in Clojure

ataggart 450 days ago

Why wait?

  user=> (defmacro mapp [part coll & colls]
          `(map (partial ~@part) ~coll ~@colls))
  #'user/mapp
  user=> (mapp (* 2) [1 2 3])
  (2 4 6)

fogus 450 days ago

Clojure provides function arity overloading and varargs, so automatic partial application is out. It's a tradeoff that Clojure alleviates by providing a lightweight function literal:

    (map #(* % 2) [1 2 3])

An added advantage of Clojure's approach is that it's not limited to partial application on the last argument.

To provide implicit partial application or arity overloading and varargs is a fundamental shift in the way that the language operates. However, the gap between (in the direction Clojure->Shen only) one and the other is 2 characters, or a mapp macro like Alex showed. I'd make that trade any day of the week. " -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129101