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2022-06-21 20:30:06

With the release of the core.async library the Clojure community has been exposed to the joys1 of Communicating Sequential Processes and Go-style asynchronousity 2. While this is all very exciting and new for the Clojure community at-large, a likewise interesting aspect of core.async’s release has been exposed — deep code-walking macros — a subject I will give an overview of herein.3

In chapter 17 of The Joy of Clojure we show an example of a macro called defformula that allows you to define spreadsheet-like cells in Clojure using watchers. For that example we intentionally required that the formulas defined be preceded by a binding vector, like so:

This allowed us to tie formula-internal variable names with existing reference types without requiring our implementation to garner the ties programmatically. The point of that section had to do with the Observer Pattern, so we didn’t want to clutter the discussion with other concerns. However, we can use the same example to illustrate deep code-walking macros (DCWM) and doing so will lead to a different implementation. For this post I’ll talk about only two types4 of DCWMs, namely: additive transformers and in-place transformers.

The defformula macro in The Joy of Clojure was indeed an additive transformer. That is, the macro took an expression and augmented it with additional stuff, specifically calls to add-watch. However, having the binding vector allowed us to assume reference type dereferencing forms (things like @foo). However, if I want to infer dereferencing forms within an expression then I will need to dive into it and find them. To do that I’d first like to have a function deref-form? that takes something and checks if it’s a dereferencing form, implemented below: