On Dec 17, 3:43 am, "Remco van 't Veer" <rwvtv...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> First off, thanks for clojure! I've been playing with it for a couple
> days now and love it!
>
> Doing ruby in my day job, I've found some quirks I don't really
> understand. Most of them are obviously me being new to clojure and a
> lisp "beginner". But the following keeps bugging me:
>
> user> (partition 2 '(1 2 3 4 5))
> ((1 2) (3 4))
>
> Why is partition swallowing the remaining element of the given
> sequence? I expected partition to return ((1 2) (3 4) (5)). The
> current implementation of partition will ensure code expecting groups
> of a given size will not break when given an unevenly distributed
> sequence. But IMO that code is responsible for how partition is
> called and should sanitize if needed. The current implementation
> might even obscure one-off errors and silently drop data.
>
> Since the current implementation is slightly more complex than the
> more lenient version I expected, there's probably a good reason why
> it's implemented as it is now. Can anybody enlighten me?
>
Well, if you were doing Mathematica in your day job you might find it
unsurprising:
http://documents.wolfram.com/mathematica/functions/Partition
I don't think cleaning up the end is very efficient. And what does
(partition 3 ...) say to the reader of the code? If it only says
"you'll get sets of 3, or maybe less" that's not saying much. The
current logic pushes the onus on the producer of the data, where it
belongs, rather then the consumer.
Not that there couldn't be a variant that made weaker promises.
Rich
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