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Mastering Clojure Macros
book

Mastering Clojure Macros

by Colin Jones
August 2014
Intermediate to advanced
120 pages
2h 45m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from Mastering Clojure Macros

Delimited Continuations

If you’ve programmed in an imperative language, chances are you’ve used a guard clause to return early from a method or function in certain cases, like the following Ruby code that approximates following someone on Twitter:

control_flow/guard_clause.rb
 
def​ follow_user(user, user_to_follow)
 
if​ user_to_follow.blocked?(user)
 
puts ​"​#{user_to_follow.name}​ has blocked ​#{user.name}​"
 
return
 
end
 
user.following << user_to_follow
 
user_to_follow.followers << user
 
end

Early returns can be confusing if we use them all over the place, but they can be useful to describe requirements for the main method body to execute. Normally in Clojure, we’d need to write something like this:

control_flow/guard_clause_1.clj ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781941222768Errata