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2017-11-01
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cfleming02:11:10

@alexmiller: > I’m also not sure how easy it is to pick up a lein project.clj and actually parse it to a point of understanding its dependencies past a naive read. This is not very easy - you’ll need to resolve the project properly, and also optionally tell it which profiles to use.

andy.fingerhut03:11:31

I think perhaps Leiningen's project.clj contents can contain executable code, in general, although most projects don't take advantage of that.

devn04:11:45

This is certainly true. A good number of projects I would wager do take advantage of this in different profiles, namely test profiles. I suppose it depends on what you’re specifically referring to by executable code, though.

andy.fingerhut04:11:44

For example, Leiningen 2.7.1 fires up a REPL using 'lein repl' in a directory with this project.clj file contents:

andy.fingerhut04:11:49

(let [version-str (str "1" ".8." "0") proj (symbol "org.clojure" "tools.namespace")] (defproject execproj "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT" :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure ~version-str] [~proj "0.2.9"]]))

cfleming04:11:29

Yes, this is the case, and you’ll definitely need to handle that. Another thing is that the lein resolution really has to be done with CWD set to the project location - lots of projects rely on that for various wierdnesses.

Alex Miller (Clojure team)14:11:19

All of this is why the plan is to make things extensible in tools.deps, and let the community work on it as they want - I don’t expect to work on this in core

cfleming04:11:50

It’s also required to either set env vars, or hook lein - all this depends whether you want to do the resolution in-process or not.

cfleming04:11:45

Cursive has some really ungodly stuff to work around all this to allow the resolution to happen in-process for speed reasons - some users have projects of > 80 lein projects.

cfleming04:11:34

If you’re only interested in resolving one project at a time then starting a subprocess is almost certainly the best idea.

seancorfield05:11:45

Hah, and if you think project.clj is hard to handle, just wait until you start looking at build.boot files which are just arbitrary executable Clojure code 🙂

Alex Miller (Clojure team)14:11:35

well, no plans to do that :)

tristefigure11:11:13

Hi. Recently I figured out a way to write and debug macros-generating macros more easily. I was confused by the different results I would get with println and pprint when displaying a list starting with the symbol quote. So i started to investigate and it turned out pprint explicitly translates (quote abc) to 'abc while the reader does the opposite job when expanding the reader macro '. I peaked at clojure.tools.reader source code, and it appeared that translating [backtick]abc to (clojure.tools.reader/syntax-quote abc) had been planned but commented out. So I wrote, as a pure development tool, a monkey-patch that enables syntax-quote <--> [backtick] translation in both the reader and pprint with this effect: Before

``abc
;; (quote my-ns/abc)

(pprint ``abc)
;; 'my-ns/abc
After
``abc
;; (clojure.core/syntax-quote my-ns/abc)

(pprint ``abc)
;; `my-ns/abc

(def args [1 2 3])

(pprint (syntax-quote `(abc ~@args)))
;; `(my-ns/abc 1 2 3)

(pprint (syntax-quote `(abc ~'~@args)))
;; `(my-ns/abc ~@args)
But above all, it prevents this:
(pprint ``(do (fn1 arg1 arg2) (fn2 arg3 arg4)))

(clojure.core/seq
 (clojure.core/concat
  (clojure.core/list 'do)
  (clojure.core/list
   (clojure.core/seq
    (clojure.core/concat
     (clojure.core/list 'user/fn1)
     (clojure.core/list 'user/arg1)
     (clojure.core/list 'user/arg2))))
  (clojure.core/list
   (clojure.core/seq
    (clojure.core/concat
     (clojure.core/list 'user/fn2)
     (clojure.core/list 'user/arg3)
     (clojure.core/list 'user/arg4))))))
And prints this instead:
(pprint ``(do (fn1 arg1 arg2) (fn2 arg3 arg4)))

`(do (user/fn1 user/arg1 user/arg2) (user/fn2 user/arg3 user/arg4))
The code itself is at https://github.com/TristeFigure/shuriken/blob/master/src/shuriken/monkey_patches/syntax_quote.clj I think this could be a great addition to Clojure (modulo the gory details of how I implemented it, especially the fact that I substitute Clojure's reader with that from clojure.tools.reader). What do you think ?

Alex Miller (Clojure team)14:11:54

What problem are you trying to solve?

tristefigure17:11:13

I made my case clearer in this snippet:

bronsa17:11:56

@tristefigure a change like this would be a breaking change, moving syntax quote from read-time to a macro, so it's highly unlikely that this will ever happen, especially when this sounds tooling could aid you in this

bronsa17:11:28

and the fact that its main use case is to aid debugging rather than a functional enhancement

bronsa17:11:57

i've felt your pain before, but realistically I don't think this will happen

ewen17:11:35

Hi, I'm trying to write a tool that would read clojure datastructures from the output of a REPL or a log stream and that would reformat it (pretty printing for example). I have a problem with the print-level and print-length options which are common in this context and which make datastructures impossible to read. I think it would make sense to make print-method to print a tag reader when the print-length or print-level limit is reached. Is this something that has been discussed before ?

bronsa17:11:36

@cgrand has done something like this for unrepl

cgrand20:11:33

@ewen there’s a bit more to it as elided hashmaps have an odd number of items

ewen20:11:33

@cgrand I see, but it should not be to hard to patch, if there is a willing to

cgrand20:11:16

I find printing already too complex

ewen20:11:43

what do you mean ?

cgrand20:11:53

print-dup, print-readably controlling the main printer, the pretty printer being its own thing governed by hald a dozen of dynvars...

hiredman20:11:11

pprint also doesn't have the contract prn has of printing readable forms, but that doesn't stop people from expecting it

ewen20:11:56

right, but prn printing readably is a very important property, everything else can be built upon

tristefigure23:11:22

@bronsa: thanks for the feedback, I was expecting it. I struggled to find an example where syntax quote would differ with the change I propose with no success. Informatively, can you tell me how I should expect it to break things ? Does this hurt performance ?