Hi, Am 18.04.2009 um 01:16 schrieb Stephen C. Gilardi:
I have a proposal for a standard way to make a namespace "executable" and to invoke it as a program/script.
I miss this so badly! Up to now, I always used gen-class to compile a class with a main function to get this functionality. Since I mostly don't do scripting in Clojure this approach worked well until yesterday. There I needed that really badly and didn't have it....
Thoughts?
Ok. You asked for it, so I will play the devil's advocate! Why this fixing on one somehow blessed function? When the namespace is loaded I can call any public function directly. Why do I need (run ...)? I don't see the value of this, since run should probably return a numeric exit code, no? While any other function will provide eg. a map or a seq, which is probably much more useful. Let me bring scsh into the discussion and show how they handle this issue. They have a command line switch to tell the scsh driver which function to invoke after loading the script. This could also be done for clojure.main: java -cp .. clojure.main -E my.ns/main my-script-defining-my-ns.clj The script does not need to be in the Classpath. As soon as it is loaded the namespace is available. (Which brings me to the double book-keeping of require...) The script could be made self-contained using hashdot: #! /usr/bin/env hashdot ;;.hashdot.main = clojure.main ;;.hashdot.args.pre = -E my-ns/main (ns my.ns) (defn main [& args] ...) ./my-script-defining-my-ns.clj With this approach I can also choose different entry points for different invokations of the same script. Although I'm not sure this is an interesting feature. Just some thoughts to a look a different approach. Sincerely Meikel
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