I really like being able to find and check documentation in the REPL
with find-doc and doc, but I often would like to see the source code
of a function or macro to be able to understand it better or learn
from the implementation. To do this I switch into an editor with
boot.clj, find and read the source, then switch back into the REPL.
Doing this a lot got me thinking, what if we could just do e.g.
user=> (source filter)
(defn filter
"Returns a lazy seq of the items in coll for which
(pred item) returns true. pred must be free of side-effects."
[pred coll]
(when (seq coll)
(if (pred (first coll))
(lazy-cons (first coll) (filter pred (rest coll)))
(recur pred (rest coll)))))
nil
user=>
This might also be also be useful for programatically generating
documentation with handy "view source" links.
I was think for the source macro something like:
(defmacro source
"Prints the source text of the top-level form in which var was
created."
[name]
`(if-let src-txt# (:source (meta (var ~name)))
(println src-txt#)
(println "no source found"))))
For that to work we would need a :source meta value like we currently
have for :line and :file.
My questions then are:
- Does the general idea of a source macro or something similar sound
useful? Am I missing something that renders such a feature
unnecessary?
- How might one implement the source macro and the associated support
in the reader/compiler?
Thanks for your thoughts,
- Mark
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