Racket Lib

This is my racket library. Nothing too interesting here yet, just a few things to make me feel comfortable in this Lisp.

functional/monads provides a few simple monads and a mlet* for for simulating Haskell do notation. This is pretty similar to my implementation of monadic binding in Emacs.

utilities/fancy-destructuring provides a clojure-like destructuring bind suite with dlet*, defn and fn. This tries to be more Scheme flavored than the Elisp version, and its built up on top of hygienic macros.

This implementation of destructuring bind can bind symbols, lists, or racket "dicts" in the racket/dict module. It looks like this:

(dlet* ((x 10)) x)

x here is bound to ten. When sumbols appear on the right hand side of each binding expression, dlet* is identical to let*. However, dlet* extends the binding abilities of let* to include destructuring. For example:

(dlet* (((: a b c) (list 1 2 3)))
   (+ a b c))

is 6. The : sigil indicates that we want to destructure a list into three variables a, b, and c. Destructuring can be nested arbitrarily. We can destructure a list within a list as so:

(dlet* (((: (: a b) c) (list (list 1 2) 3)))
   (+ a b c))

is also 6.

fancy-destructuring also supports destructuring anything which is a dict in accordance with Racket's racket/dict library. This covers structs, various kinds of hash tables, and association lists. Dict destructuring is introduced with the :> sigil:

(dlet* (((:> x 'a y 'b) '((a . 10) (b . 11))))
   (list x y))

evaluates to: (10 11). You can nest destructuring expressions for lists or tables anywhere a symbol is expected above.

If an item is not in the data structure to be destructured, then the variable corresponding to that item is bound to unbound.

It is useful to have a way of binding where default values are supported. This library uses decorated sigils to accomplish this task:

(dlet* ((((: or '(1 2 3)) a b c)
         (list 10 11)))
  (list a b c))

evaluates to: (10 11 3) because the provided list is too short to provide all the bindings.

It is also useful to bind the structure itself occasionally. This is supported with the as sigil decoration:

(dlet* ((((:> as table) a 'x)
        '((x . 10))))
 (list table a))

evaluates to ( ((x . 10)) 10). as causes the input table to be bound directly to the provided name. as and or can be used together and specified in any order.

Binding for Procedures

It is nice to have this destructuring for function definition argument lists, so the library provides defn and fn forms which use these features to destructure their arguments.

(defn (add-three-list (: a b c))
 (+ a b c))

Takes a list with at least three arguments and adds them together. Pretty useful!