Question

I recently started reading Paul Grahams ‘On Lisp’, and learning learning clojure along with it, so there’s probably some really obvious error in here, but I can’t see it: (its a project euler problem, obviously)

(ns net.projecteuler.problem31)

(def paths (ref #{}))

; apply fun to all elements of coll for which pred-fun returns true
(defn apply-if [pred-fun fun coll]
  (apply fun (filter pred-fun coll)))

(defn make-combination-counter [coin-values]
  (fn recurse
    ([sum] (recurse sum 0 '()))
    ([max-sum current-sum coin-path]
      (if (= max-sum current-sum)
          ; if we've recursed to the bottom, add current path to paths
          (dosync (ref-set paths (conj @paths (sort coin-path))))
          ; else go on recursing
          (apply-if (fn [x] (<= (+ current-sum x) max-sum))
              (fn [x] (recurse max-sum (+ x current-sum) (cons x coin-path)))
              coin-values)))))

(def count-currency-combinations (make-combination-counter '(1 2 5 10 20 50 100 200)))
(count-currency-combinations 200)

When I run the last line in the REPL, i get the error:

<#CompilerException java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Wrong number of args passed to: problem31$eval--25$make-combination-counter--27$recurse--29$fn (NO_SOURCE_FILE:0)>

Apart from the question where the error is, the more interesting question would be: How would one debug this? The error message isn’t very helpful, and I haven’t found a good way to single-step clojure code, and I can’t really ask on stack overflow every time I have a problem.

Answer 1

Three tips that might make your life easier here:

1. Wrong number of args passed to: problem31$eval--25$make-combination-counter--27$recurse--29$fn (NO_SOURCE_FILE:0)>
   Tells you roughly where the error occurred: $fn at the end there means anonymous function and it tells you it was declared inside recurse, which was declared inside make-combination-counter. There are two anonymous functions to choose from.

2. If you save your source-code in a file and execute it as a script it will give you a full stack trace with the line numbers in the file.

   at net.projecteuler.problem31$apply_if__9.invoke(problem31.clj:7)
   

   Note you can also examine the last exception and stack trace from within the REPL by examining *e eg: (.stackTrace *e) The stack trace is at first quite daunting because it throws up all the Java internals. You need to learn to ignore those and just look for the lines that refer to your code. This is pretty easy in your case as they all start with net.projecteuler

3. You can name your anonymous functions to help more quickly identify them:

   (fn check-max [x] (<= (+ current-sum x) max-sum))
   

In your case using all this info you can see that apply-if is being passed a single argument function as fun. Apply does this (f [1 2 3]) -> (f 1 2 3). From your comment what you want is map. (map f [1 2 3]) -> (list (f 1) (f 2) (f 3)). When I replace apply with map the program seems to work.

Finally, if you want to examine values you might want to look into clojure-contrib.logging which has some helpers to this effect. There is a spy macro which allows you to wrap an expression, it will return exactly the same expression so it does not affect the result of your function but will print out EXPR = VALUE, which can be handy. Also on the group various people have posted full tracing solutions. And there is always the trusty println. But the key skill here is being able to identify precisely what blew up. Once you know that it is usually clear why, but sometimes printouts are needed when you can’t tell what the inputs are.