On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Rich Hickey <richhic...@gmail.com> wrote: > People who know what they are doing can do these things right now with > Clojure's array support. There really isn't any more value for Clojure > to add to that, so no special primitives. I fully accept the necessity > of doing that at times, and the correctness of internally mutating, > but externally referentially transparent functions, and Clojure has > several of them. That's one of the reasons Clojure isn't 'pure'. OTOH > it's not a good argument for mutable local vars. What other "unsafe > things" are you looking for?
After giving this some more thought, I think the absolutely simplest way to further improve Clojure's mutability support would be to add an atom-set function for the cases where you really want to clobber the contents of atom and don't care what the contents already are. This takes the "variable which needs no synchronization" thing one step further, allowing for fastest speed in those situations. The semantics would be like this: (defn atom-set [a val] (swap! a (constantly val))) But presumably it could be implemented in the Clojure core in a way that is even faster than the above implementation, since it doesn't need to do the check that the contents haven't changed before setting. I think this is consistent with the idea of atom as a power-user's tool for getting the best possible performance when synchronization is not required. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
