James Reeves <ja...@booleanknot.com> writes: >> >> Actually, I think that this is a real problem with Clojure, and with >> data access. It is very hard to change between accessing a var as a >> value and through calling a value. >> > > Curiously, this is something I don't think I've ever run into. > > Perhaps I'm the outlier, but both the examples you give seem a little odd > to me.
I don't know who is the outlier. The point is that Scala, for instance, has explicit support to hide the distinction between accessing a value and computing a value. The point is to support the uniform access principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_access_principle To my knowledge, Clojure cannot do this. > Vars are generally reserved for constants, functions, dynamics and > (sometimes) application caches. If you're putting anything else in a var, > it's probably wrong. When I first wrote the var, I thought it was going to be a constant. However, during the development of my code base, I discovered in one or two small uses cases, it could not be. > With regard to automatically :doc string, why can't you set it when the var > is created? Two reasons. The first is specific to my library, which is that the var contains a mutable Java object. So the :doc string may change over time, independently of the value of the var. "Don't use mutable objects" would be an obvious response, but not a useful one in this case. The second reason is more general. I tried adding the :doc metadata to the vars after they had all been created, but generating this string involves pretty printing of lisp code, and this is computationally intensive. In my hands, my code would take, say, 1 minute to load and then I'd wait 5 minutes for the doc string metadata to update. So, I want to do this lazily -- in practice, :doc strings are rarely used, so why compute them all when only a few or none might ever be used. Phil -- 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.
