Object Commando

I ran into the following situation a few times, I had a list of items, and I was attempting to call a function that accepted individual items. As an example, I had a list of contact information, where the first element is the contact name, the second, contact info, the third a contact name and so on. This is exactly how the sorted-map function works in Clojure, only it expects the items individually, not the list. The doc for sorted-map is below:

clojure.core/sorted-map
([& keyvals])
keyval => key val
Returns a new sorted map with supplied mappings.


An example of how to call it is something like:

user> (sorted-map 1 2 3 4)
{1 2, 3 4}


What I had instead was something like [1 2 3 4]. An easy way to convert the list to individual arguments is the apply function:

clojure.core/apply
([f args* argseq])
Applies fn f to the argument list formed by prepending args to argseq.


Swapping out the direct sorted-map call for an apply call looks like:

user> (apply sorted-map '(1 2 3 4))
{1 2, 3 4}


Note it returns the same result as calling the function directly. Using apply saved me from writing code to iterate over each item and manually add them to the map.