In a precedent post, we have presented the basics of destructuring in Clojure.

Here, we present a trully amazing way of defining default options for a function, leveraging Clojure destructuring.

The need

Let’s say you want to write a function foo that is very cusomizable, something like 27 optional parameters where each parameter has a default value.

How do you write such a function in Clojure?

Think about it for a few minutes before going on…

Think about it for a few more minutes before going on…

The solution

As it often happens, Clojure provides a simple and elegant solution for this complex semantic problem.

There is a cool :or directive available for destructuring.

We will illustrate it with a simple hello-world function that receives two options: language and upper-case?.

The cool thing is that with one line of code, you create local bindings with default values:

{:keys [language upper-case?] 
  :or {language :en
       upper-case? false}

Pay attention to the way the keys are defined inside the :or directive: the keys are defined as symbols, there are no :!

Enough words!

Let’s see it in action, with KLIPSE (feel free to play with the code, inside the article):

(ns my.args
  (:require [clojure.string :as string]))

(defn hello-world [& {:keys [language upper-case?] 
                      :or {language :en
                                                 upper-case? false}}]

                                                   (let [greeting (case language
                                                                      :fr "bonjour monde"
                                                                                         :en "hello world")]
                                                                                             (if upper-case?
                                                                                                   (string/upper-case greeting)
                                                                                                         greeting)))

  (hello-world)

    (hello-world :language :fr)

      (hello-world :upper-case? true)

Clojure rocks!