As others have noted, this is pretty much what monads are made for. I've found Brian Marick's "Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer"'s chapter on monads really good at teaching how to recognize situations where monads would be a good fit.
For this specific use-case, you can probably, as an intermediate solution, define a fairly simple macro that would get you almost all you want, something like: (defmacro mlet [bindings & body] (if (seq bindings) (let [[b expr & r] bindings] `(try (let [~b ~expr] (mlet ~r ~@body)) (catch Exception e# (let [~b [:mlet/error e#]] (let ~(->> r (partition 2) (mapcat (fn [[b _]] [b :mlet/unbound])) vec) ~@body))))) `(do ~@body))) (mlet [a (+ 1 2) b (- a 3) c (/ 10 b) d (inc c)] [a b c d]);; => [3 0 [:mlet/error #error {#_elided}] :mlet/unbound] Depending on how much complexity you're willing to bear within that macro, you could do smarter things like detecting which variables can still be computed, etc. Maybe also take a look at prismatic graph? https://github.com/plumatic/plumbing -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.