Getting Clojure

Getting Less than Everything

Conveniently, we don’t have to have a one-to-one correspondence between the names and the data. For example, if we are only interested in the first three elements of our four-item vector, we could say this:

(let [[painter novelist composer] artists]
  (println "The painter is" painter)
  (println "The novelist is" novelist)
  (println "The composer is" composer))

and simply ignore the leftover data, in this case :dickinson.

But what if we wanted to ignore some of the leading items of the vector? No problem—we can put a dummy name in as a placeholder:

(let [[dummy dummy composer poet] artists]
  (println "The composer is" composer)
  (println "The poet is" poet))

There’s nothing special about the ...