Question

Is there a possibility to check if something is a partial function in Clojure?

It would be best to have something like (partial? (partial + 10)) ?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

No, because functions created by partial are just “normal” functions.
You could however use some metadata for it, like this:

(defn partial2 [f & more]
  (with-meta (apply partial f more) {:partial true}))

(def partial-plus (partial2 + 1 2))

(meta partial-plus) ;;=> {:partial true}

Haven’t really thought through the consequences of this approach though…

Kotarak came up with a nicer solution that works, but not always. For example take this:

(partial? (partial + 1)) ;;=> true
(partial? (partial + 1 2)) ;;=> false

This works:

(defn partial? [f]
  (let [[fst snd] (-> (class f) (.getName) (string/split #"\$"))]
    (= ["clojure.core" "partial"] [fst snd])))

with string/split being the split function from clojure.string (1.3) or clojure.contrib.str-utils2 (1.2).