When I implemented propaganda I was in need of generic operators with predicate dispatch. It wasn’t available in Clojure, and I had to spend a bit of time implementing it and to come up with a set of acceptable tradeoffs.
I have extracted the generic operator implementation from the propaganda
library and it available separatly as the library
kaleidoscope. The library offers
two functions: generic-operator for creating a new generic operator,
and assign-operation for assigning an operation to an existing
operator. assign-operation is a destructive operation.
In this example we are creating our own version of the +-operator,
which works on both numbers and strings.
(require '[kaleidoscope :refer (generic-operator assign-operation)])
(let [plus (generic-operator +)]
(doto plus
(assign-operation concat vector? vector?))
[(plus 1 2)
(plus [1 2 3] [4 5])])
;; => [3 (1 2 3 4 5)]A more advanced example is the mixing of datatypes in basic operations.
(defrecord Interval
[lo hi])
(defn make-interval
"Returns a new closed interval from lo to hi."
[lo hi]
(Interval. lo hi))
(defn mul-interval
"Multiplies the intervals. Assumes all limits are positive."
[x y]
(make-interval (* (:lo x) (:lo y)) (* (:hi x) (:hi y))))
(defn div-interval
"Divides the intervals. Assumes all limits are strictly positive."
[x y]
(mul-interval x (make-interval (/ 1 (:hi y)) (/ 1 (:lo y)))))
(defn square-interval
[x]
(make-interval (* (:lo x) (:lo x))
(* (:hi x) (:hi x))))
(defn sqrt-interval
[x]
(make-interval (Math/sqrt (double (:lo x)))
(Math/sqrt (double (:hi x)))))
(defn interval?
"Returns true iff x is an interval."
[x]
(isa? (type x) Interval))
(defn ->interval
"Ensures x is an interval. If x is already an interval, x is
returned. If x is not, an interval from x to x is returned."
[x]
(if (interval? x)
x
(make-interval x x)))
(defn coercing
"Returns a version of f that will coerce arguments using coercer
before applying them."
[coercer f]
(fn [& args]
(apply f (map coercer args))))
(def generic-mul (doto (generic-operator *)
(assign-operation mul-interval
interval? interval?)
(assign-operation (coercing ->interval mul-interval)
number? interval?)
(assign-operation (coercing ->interval mul-interval)
interval? number?)))
(def generic-div (doto (generic-operator /)
(assign-operation div-interval
interval? interval?)
(assign-operation (coercing ->interval div-interval)
number? interval?)
(assign-operation (coercing ->interval div-interval)
interval? number?)))
(def generic-square (doto (generic-operator (fn [x] (* x x)))
(assign-operation
square-interval
interval?)))
(def generic-sqrt (doto (generic-operator (fn [x] (Math/sqrt (double x))))
(assign-operation
sqrt-interval
interval?)))
(generic-mul 2 3)
;; => 6
(generic-mul 2 (Interval. 3 4))
;; => {:lo 6, :hi 8}
(generic-mul (Interval. 2 3) (Interval. 3 4))
;; => {:lo 6, :hi 12}
(generic-square (Interval. 3 4))
;; => {:lo 9, :hi 16}
(-> (Interval. 10 20)
(generic-mul (Interval. 10 80))
generic-sqrt)
;; => {:lo 10.0, :hi 40.0}The examples do not fully demonstrate the possibilities in the library as we could have achieved something similar with multimethods. Unlike multimethods, generic operators are not bound to a namespace, and they support arbitrary predicate dispatch, not just type dispatch (meta types or otherwise).
I would recomment studying the literature for more advanced usages of predicate dispatch.
For a discussion of the tradeoffs made in kaleidoscope, please see this blog post.