Object Commando languages, development and design

Circular Lists with Clojure

I was working on some code that repeatedly executed a defined set of queries against a database for a give amount of time. Think throughput testing. The list of queries was very small (like 5) but the number of times each was executed was pretty high (500+). After it executed the 5th query, I wanted it to execute the first one again and continue on. So I thought the easiest way to go about this was to have a circular-type list. I figured in Clojure it probably wouldn't be circular, but rather a lazy list that repeated itself. I looked around the source a bit (the internet connection at work was down, so there was no Google searching) and I wasn't coming up with anything. Not finding anything that fit my needs, I thought about it and made a couple of attempts at a solution. I was pretty unhappy with the solutions I was coming up with. I went back to the Clojure source trying to figure out how best to implement this and I stumbled on cycle. It was exactly what I needed. What struck me about cycle, was how concise and simple it was. First, it's use:

(take 10 (cycle (list 1 2 3 4)))
;=> (1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2)

It takes the collection passed in and creates a lazy sequence of the items in the list repeated infinitely. I would keep consuming items from this infinite list for some defined amount of time and then stop:

(doseq [query (cycle (query-list...))
               :while (keep-going? @run-state)]
    (execute-query query...))

In the above code, run-state is an atom that is updated once a particular point of time has been reached and then the query run completes. What struck me about the cycle function, was how simple it was:

(defn cycle
  "Returns a lazy (infinite!) sequence of repetitions of the
   items in coll."
  {:added "1.0"}
  [coll]
 (lazy-seq
          (when-let [s (seq coll)]
              (concat s (cycle s)))))

It's a very concise function. Here's a rundown of what it does. The lazy-seq macro takes as it's body an expression that yields a sequence (or nil). It's lazy, so it doesn't actually fully realize the sequence. Inside the lazy-seq call is a when-let which just ensures that what is passed in is a collection that has at least one element in it. If it is not a collection of at least one element, the lazy-seq is just nil. If it does, the sequence that the lazy-seq function is looking for comes from the concat statement. Concat is simple, it takes one or more collections and returns a single collection containing all of the elements in each passed in collection:

(concat (list 1 2 3 4) (list 5 6 7 8))
; =>(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 

With that info, the concat in cycle glues together the entire collection that was passed in, followed by a recursive call to itself (passing in the same collection). So with that, if the same 1, 2, 3, 4 list is passed in to cycle, the last line looks like:

(concat (list 1 2 3 4) (cycle (list 1 2 3 4)))

After the first four items are consumed, the recursive invocation of cycle will happen, again producing (list 1 2 3 4) followed by another recursive invocation. Since it's lazy and infinite, this can continue until the query execution time is up, whether it's 5 seconds or 5 hours.