Clojure and me » 2008

»When the pupil is ready to learn, a teacher will appear.

Multimethods aren’t magic (nor mutable)

mistakes — cgrand, 28 May 2008 @ 17 h 55 min

What does this code display?

(defmulti foo first)
(def print-foo (comp println foo))
(defmethod foo :a [x]
  "it's a 'a'!")
(print-foo [:a])

Nothing, it raises an error: it doesn’t know what to do with the dispatch value :a. The value of foo is captured when comp is called.

The thing to keep in mind is that defmethod mutates the var, not the multimethod itself — which is of course immutable. The solution is to pass the var instead of the multimethod to comp:

(defmulti foo first)
(def print-foo (comp println #'foo))
(defmethod foo :a [x]
  "it's a 'a'!")
(print-foo [:a]) ; prints "it's a 'a'!"

Update or maybe it’s a code smell that you should use a macro instead of a function.

Update 2 Clojure’s father (Rich Hickey) says : the correct thing to do is use the var.

Comments (1)

Jumping to Javadocs from the REPL

utilities — cgrand, @ 17 h 29 min

(defn open-url [url]
  (let [htmlpane (new javax.swing.JEditorPane url)]
    (.setEditable htmlpane false)
    (.addHyperlinkListener htmlpane
      (proxy [javax.swing.event.HyperlinkListener] []
        (hyperlinkUpdate [#^javax.swing.event.HyperlinkEvent e]
          (when (= (.getEventType e) (. javax.swing.event.HyperlinkEvent$EventType ACTIVATED))
            (if (instance? javax.swing.text.html.HTMLFrameHyperlinkEvent e)
              (.. htmlpane getDocument (processHTMLFrameHyperlinkEvent e))
              (try
                (.setPage htmlpane (.getURL e))
                (catch Throwable t
                               (.printStackTrace t))))))))
    (doto (new javax.swing.JFrame)
      (setContentPane (new javax.swing.JScrollPane htmlpane))
      (setBounds 32 32 700 900)
      (show))))

(defn javadoc [c]
  (let [url (str "http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/"
              (.. c getName (replace \. \/) (replace \$ \.)) ".html")]
    (open-url url)))

; usage:
; (javadoc Throwable) opens a window displaying Throwable's javadoc 
; hint: (javadoc (class some-object))

Comments (1)