Hi Mark and Baishampayan, I can see what difference it makes, but I can't get a handle on the rationale. For instance, I found this discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1257028/why-should-i-use-apply-in-clojure
It starts with a quote from a Rich Hickey blog post, as follows. > A big difference between Clojure and CL is that Clojure is a Lisp-1, so > funcall is not needed, and apply is only used to apply a function to a > runtime-defined collection of arguments. So, (apply f [i]) can be written > (f i). But it can't, can it? In this context (apply f [i]) with respect to (f i)* apply *has *side-effects*! Further on in the discussion, this example is given. (+ [1 2 3 4 5]) which does not add the numbers. But > (apply + [1 2 3 4 5]) does. There seem to be inscrutabilities in the way arguments are handled in Clojure. The reason this is so troubling is that going the other way is so transparent. That is, a String is automatically converted to a sequence as required. > On Saturday, 15 December 2012 20:39:04 UTC+10, Marko Topolnik wrote: > > > I'm still puzzled about this though, because (doc str) says that with one >> argument x, str returns x.toString(). What it returns is >> "clojure.lang.LazySeq@fe1" >> >> So it seems to be returning a lazy sequence. Why is the function not >> simply applied? Other functions are "applied" simple by expressing their >> form. >> > > No, it is returning exactly as advertised, the result of calling > #toString() on an instance of LazySeq. > > The difference between (str a-lazy-seq) and (apply str a-lazy-seq) is that > in the first case str is called with one argument, the lazy seq, and in the > second case with, say 5 arguments, for a lazy seq of length 5. The lazy seq > is *spliced* into separate arguments to str. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
