This is clj-iter, an iteration macro for Clojure inspired by the excellent [iterate] 1 library for Common Lisp (henceforth Iterate).
clj-iter was written by Daniel Janus dj@danieljanus.pl. Please send any patches or suggestions to that address.
I wrote clj-iter because I needed a handy way of iterating over multiple sequences at once.
I did not intend clj-iter to be 100% compatible with Common Lisp iterate. Instead, the design goal was to keep it as simple as possible, and make it blend well with the rest of Clojure. In contrast to [cl-loop] 2 (a similar library inspired by Common Lisp's standard LOOP macro), which uses mutable bindings, clj-iter has a functional flavour, and macroexpands to the kind of code you would write manually using loop/recur.
The following code takes a list of integers and sums them with consecutive natural numbers:
(iter (for x in [31 41 59 26])
(for y from 1)
(collect (+ x y)))
==> (32 43 62 30)
And here is the macroexpansion:
(loop [collected4234 nil G__4233 [31 41 59 26] y 1]
(let [x (first G__4233)]
(if (and (empty? G__4233))
(reverse collected4234)
(do
(recur
(if true (cons (+ x y) collected4234) collected4234)
(next G__4233)
(inc y))))))
The following function takes a number (size) and a collection, and transforms each element into a list containing itself and neighbouring elements, i.e., the distance of which from the element in question is not greater than size:
(defn sliding-window [coll size]
(iter (for s on coll)
(for q initially () then (cons (first s) q))
(collect (cons (first s) (concat (take size (rest s)) (take size q))))))
This is a neat (and extremely readable) example of raising to a positive integer power (yes, I know there's clojure.contrib.math, but just for the sake of example...):
(defn pow [x y]
(iter (repeat y) (multiply x)))
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clj-iter supports only the following clauses:
FOR var FROM starting-value [TO/BELOW ending-value] [BY step-value] FOR var DOWNFROM starting-value [TO/BELOW ending-value] [BY step-value] FOR var IN sequence FOR var ON sequence FOR var INITIALLY initial-expr THEN then-expr [STOP stop-condition] FOR var = expr REPEAT number-of-times RETURN expr IF condition COLLECT expr [IF condition] FINALLY-COLLECT expr SUM expr [IF condition] MULTIPLY expr [IF condition] REDUCE expr fn [IF condition]The symbols that are treated specially by clj-iter are spelled here in uppercase to distinguish them visually, but they should appear in lowercase in the source code. Just like in Iterate, they can also be keywords (i.e., you can equivalently say (for i from 1) or (:for i :from 1)).
The optional subclauses are shown here in square brackets.
Patches to support other Iterate functionality are most welcome!
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There is currently no proper documentation except this file, but the unit tests at the end of iter.clj should give you some more examples of how to use clj-iter.
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Unlike Iterate, clj-iter does not do code-walking. The entire body of the ITER macro should consist of either clj-iter clauses, or forms to be evaluated (and results discarded) on each iteration; these forms cannot contain clj-iter clauses. This means that the COLLECT clause has an optional conditional IF subclause; e.g., to collect all the even numbers of a series, you should write
(iter (for x from 0 to 9) (collect x if (even? x)))instead of Common Lisp
(iter (for x from 0 to 9) (when (evenp x) (collect x))) -
Unlike Iterate, clj-iter uses the same prepositions (IN and ON) for iterating over all seqable data, regardless of whether they are lists, vectors or maps.
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Destructuring works in FOR clauses:
(iter (for [k v] in {:a 2, :b 3, :c 4}) (collect k if (even? v))) ==> (:a :c) -
In clj-iter, all bindings are established simultaneously on each iteration. Thus, the following returs first Fibonacci numbers:
(iter (for a from 0 to 10) (for x initially 0 then y) (for y initially 1 then (+ x y)) (collect x)) ==> (0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55)In Iterate, it would return (0 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512).