Class 18: Clojure (1)

Held: Friday, 4 March 2011

Summary: We begin our exploration of Clojure, yet another dialect of Lisp.

Related Pages:

• EBoard.
• Lab: Clojure (1).
• Reading: Tate 7.1-7.2.

Notes:

• Assignment 7 will be distributed late Saturday night.
• No CS table or CS extras next week.

Overview:

• Why JVM?
• Clojure vs. Scheme.
• A Challenge.
• Lab.

Why JVM?

• One of you asked Why build Erlang and Clojure on top of the JVM?
  • Implicit: And on top of the CLR.
• I thought the answer was obvious, but the question was asked (and not answered), so it seems useful to cover in class.
• How many reasons can you come up with?

Clojure vs. Scheme

• What do you see as the big differences between Clojure and Scheme? (At least given what you've learned about Clojure.)
  • Syntax
  • Data types
  • Functions provided
  • Changes in function operation
  • Other
• Why do you think the designer of Clojure made those decisions?

Challenge

• What's the most concise code you can write for (in-order nums), that holds if nums is in order from smallest to largest.
• You may assume that nums is a list of numbers.

Lab

• Do The lab.
• Be prepared to reflect.