Question

I’m looking at Scheme (Dr-Scheme) coming from Clojure.

In Clojure I can type

(print 'a 'b 'c)

and the print function figures out that this is an arbitrary number of non-string arguments and prints them out separated by a space.

In Scheme the print function expects a single argument.

Is there a way to get the equivalent of Clojure’s print function in Scheme?

Answer 1

Interesting… you can roll one of those pretty easily, but I’m not sure I see the need for it. For instance:

#lang racket

(define (print-many . args)
  (display
   (apply
    string-append
    (add-between (map print-to-string args) " "))))

(define (print-to-string arg) (format "~v" arg))

(print-many 3 4 5 'b '(3 3 4))

In general, though, I’m thinking that if you’re generating output for a user, you’re going to want better control over the output, and if you’re not generating output for a user, you’re just as happy slapping a pair of parens around it and making it into a list.

What’s the use case for this?