Programming Clojure, 2nd Edition

How to Be Lazy

Functional programs make great use of recursive definitions. A recursive definition consists of two parts:

• A basis, which explicitly enumerates some members of the sequence

• An induction, which provides rules for combining members of the sequence to produce additional members

Our challenge in this section is converting a recursive definition into working code. You might do this in several ways:

• A simple recursion, using a function that calls itself in some way to implement the induction step.

• A tail recursion, using a function only calling itself at the tail end of its execution. Tail recursion enables an important optimization.

• A lazy sequence that eliminates actual recursion and calculates a value later, when it is ...