Suppose you have three functions of arity 1, 2 and 3 as below:
(defn I [x] x)
(defn K [x y] x)
(defn S [x y z] (x z (y z)))
Does clojure have an evaluation function or idiom for evaluating:
(I K S I I) as (I (K (S (I (I)))))
returning a parital function of arity 2?
I am considering creating a macro that can take the simple function definitions above and expand them to multi-arity functions that can return partial results. I would not want to create the macro if there is already a built in or idiomatic way to accomplish this.
Here is what the expanded macros would like for the above functions:
(defn I
([x] I x)
([x & more] (apply (I x) more)))
(defn K
([x] (partial K x))
([x y] x)
([x y & more] (apply (K x y) more)))
(defn S
([x] (partial S x))
([x y] (partial S x y))
([x y z] (x z (y z)))
([x y z & more] (apply (S x y z) more)))
I'm not sure I fully understand what you are trying to do, but the comp function is useful for doing this kind of "function chaining" you seem to be talking about. For example:
user> ((comp vec rest list) 1 2 3 4 5)
=> [2 3 4 5]
Which is equivalent to:
user> (vec (rest (list 1 2 3 4 5)))
=> [2 3 4 5]
In your case, if you have the list (I K S I I), and you want to evaluate it as (I (K (S (I (I))))), I would use (reduce comp ...), but you could also use (apply comp ...).
user> ((reduce comp [vec rest list]) 1 2 3 4 5)
=> [2 3 4 5]
user> ((apply comp [vec rest list]) 1 2 3 4 5)
=> [2 3 4 5]
You may also be interested in the -> or ->> macros. These macros nest their arguments sequentially into the next arguments. The -> macro will nest into the first position of the next expression, whereas the ->> macro will nest into the last position of the next expression. If the "next thing" is a function, both will behave the same, and form an expression of (function nested-things-so-far), and continue along.
Really, examples are best:
(-> 1 (+ 10) (- 100) inc)
;//Expands to...
(inc (- (+ 1 10) 100))
;//Evaluating in the REPL...
user> (-> 1 (+ 10) (- 100) inc)
=> -88
(->> 1 (+ 10) (- 100) inc)
;//Expands to...
(inc (- 100 (+ 10 1)))
;//Evaluating in the REPL...
user> (-> 1 (+ 10) (- 100) inc)
=> 90
However, it seems more like you want to do something involving auto-currying (although, again, I don't think I fully understand), and for that I don't know of anything pre-existing built-in way.