At work today some code turned up that looked like this:

;; sum a, b, c, d if they're all defined, otherwise report which one is not
;; defined
(if-let [a x]
  (if-let [b y]
    (if-let [c z]
      (if-let [d w]
        (+ a b c d)
        :d-is-nil)
      :c-is-nil)
    :b-is-nil)
  :a-is-nil)

This is not easy to read, even in in the vastly simplifed form shown above. The else expressions are far away form their corresponding then expressions.

I couldn’t find a good built-in or idiom for doing this in Clojure. For reference, here’s what I looked at:

Since it’s extremely repetitive looking code, it seemed like a macro might be in order. I came up with this:

(defmacro nif-let
  "Nested if-let. If all bindings are non-nil, execute body in the context of
  those bindings.  If a binding is nil, evaluate its `else-expr` form and stop
  there.  `else-expr` is otherwise not evaluated.

  bindings* => binding-form else-expr"
  [bindings & body]
  (cond
    (= (count bindings) 0) `(do ~@body)
    (symbol? (bindings 0)) `(if-let ~(subvec bindings 0 2)
                              (nif-let ~(subvec bindings 3) ~@body)
                              ~(bindings 2))
    :else (throw (IllegalArgumentException. "symbols only in bindings"))))

I’m not an experienced macro writer. Most of this is adapted from with-open which felt vaguely similar in that it generates a deeply nested bunch of code. It also will only work for simple binding forms, but it was good enough for the situation at hand. The nested code above becomes:

(nif-let [a x :a-is-nil
          b y :b-is-nil
          c z :c-is-nil
          d w :d-is-nil]
         (+ a b c d))

This reads a lot better, but having to ensure the result is not some arbitrary set of keywords to determine that it actually worked is non-ideal. Slightly better might be to wrap the result in something more descriptive.

(let [fail (fn [x] {:status :failed :value x})
      ok (fn [x] {:status :ok :value x})]
  (nif-let [a x (fail :a-is-nil)
            b y (fail :b-is-nil)
            c z (fail :c-is-nil)
            d w (fail :d-is-nil)]
           (ok (+ a b c d))))

This will yield values like {:status :failed :value :a-is-nil} or {:status :ok :value 42}, which is slightly less bad to inspect. You could easily include the fail and ok calls in the macro itself, but it seems more reusable not to.

This all has a monadic smell to it. I’m sure there’s an existing monad in algo.monads that could do it succinctly, but I’d want to spend some time understanding that code before pulling it in.

I find it odd that there’s not a common idiom in the “standard libarary” for this. Maybe I just haven’t been searching for the right thing.

Update 2013-12-12: solution to this same problem in Scala.