CODEWITHSUNDEEP
syntaxclojuresyntactic-sugar
jiyinyiyong
jiyinyiyong

Reputation: 4713

Is there any program to add brackets of Clojure?

When I'm learning Clojure of some languages, the readability and convenience of syntax is the most important issue(Maybe this's wrong..).
So, Clojure is greatly appealing me, but there might be to many brackets to maintain.
And I'm considering if there's a script with which I can write code without some brackets and then compile it to Clojure, that should be better. Does such programe exists so far?
(Once told there is a indentation syntax for Scheme, that's nice. How about Clojure?)

Upvotes: 3

Views: 248

Answers (2)

Marc
Marc

Reputation: 824

Once you get used to the parens, they actually become easier to read than Java code. What's more critical for readability is proper indentation. Any decent IDE will correct the indentation of a block of code for you.

However, you might find that macros do what you want. For example, the threading macro (->) or the .. macro. And you can write your own macros for more specific purposes.

Here's an example:

user=> (str (inc (Integer/parseInt "10"))) "11"

could be rewritten as user=> (-> "10" Integer/parseInt inc str) "11"

A savings of two paren-pairs! Woot!

Going back to your original question, if you can write non-ambiguous code with fewer parens for a given situation, then it should be possible to write a macro to expand the less-parens syntax into real Clojure. Do you have an example of what you're looking for?

Upvotes: 3

mikera
mikera

Reputation: 106351

Usually you use an editor or IDE that will take care of the brackets for you.

It is especially useful to have "rainbow parens", i.e. the parentheses are given different colours to match their nesting level so you can quickly see how they line up.

Some options:

  • The Counterclockwise plugin for Eclipse - great if you are already an Eclipse user of if you want to mix Clojure and Java code.
  • Emacs - a common choice for Lisp programmers. There is a pretty good set of Clojure tools for Emacs

Note that in general, because of it's conciseness, Clojure code uses fewer parentheses than the equivalent Java code.

Upvotes: 8

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