While trying to solve the 4Clojure problem "Universal Computation Engine" involving reimplementing evaluation, I accidentally ended up calling something like this:
(apply '/ '(16 8))
rather than the intended:
(apply / '(16 8))
This had the confusing side effect of returning 8
, which made me think I had messed up my maths.
I later realised my error after some debugging—I was failing to evaluate the /
symbol before attempting to call it—and so realised that clojure.lang.Symbol
must implement clojure.lang.IFn
. But what does that implementation do? All I can get it to do is return nil
with one argument, or the second argument if given.
Symbols look themselves up in a map, much as keywords do. See Symbol's implementation:
…
122 public Object invoke(Object obj) {
123 return RT.get(obj, this);
124 }
125
126 public Object invoke(Object obj, Object notFound) {
127 return RT.get(obj, this, notFound);
128 }
…
(RT
is clojure.lang.RT
, which does just about everything. "RunTime"?)
In the example given, the lookup is failing (because 16 is not a map), and therefore the notFound
value (8) is being returned.