Types and Tailcalls

A Clojure Macro to Generate Functions

published on October 21st, 2011

Prompted by this question on Stackoverflow I thought a little bit about macros that generate functions. Here is what I came up with:

(defmacro make-placeholders [n]
  `(map eval
        '~(for [cntr (range 0 n)]
           `(defn ~(symbol (str "_" cntr))
               {:placeholder true} [& args] (nth args ~cntr)))))

This is macro generates functions _0 .. _n-1 that calls nth on the list of the arguments following it, so (_2 1 2 3 4) returns 3. I have not made up my mind if it is really a good idea to do this, but for now it's a clever hack - maybe I'll use it until I discover why it's a bad idea...


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