Walker is my name
and I am the same.
Riddley Walker.
Walking my riddels
where ever theyve took me
and walking them now
on this paper the same.
from Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
Code may be data, but only some of that data is executable. If we want to perform a pervasive code transformation, using something like clojure.walk
presents a few problems:
- binding forms are treated the same as actual expressions
clojure.walk/macroexpand-all
will pass in a nil&env
to all macros- macroexpansion doesn't expand inlined functions
This means that transforms that we intend to apply to expressions may have unintended consequences on a fn
, let
, or case
form. It also means that any macro which relies on &env
will not compose with our transformation. Finally, if inlined functions aren't expanded, this can break certain transformations.
[riddley "0.1.14"]
Riddley provides a correct riddley.walk/macroexpand-all
, which preserves the binding information in &env
and expands inlined functions, and riddley.walk/walk-exprs
, which is a general mechanism for code walking and transformation.
walk-exprs
takes two arguments, a predicate
for whether it should transform the sub-form, and a handler
for doing the transformation.
riddley.walk> (walk-exprs number? inc '(let [n 1] (+ n 1)))
(let* [n 2] (. clojure.lang.Numbers (add n 2)))
Notice that walk-exprs
implicitly macroexpands the form, including the inline form for +
. Unlike clojure.walk
, if handler
is called, sub-forms will not be walked. The handler function is responsible for recursively calling walk-exprs
on the form it's handed.
Access to &env
is available via (riddley.compiler/locals)
if you need it as part of your transformation.
Full documentation can be found here.
Copyright © 2013 Zachary Tellman
Distributed under the MIT License.