Protocols
One piece of Clojure’s solution to the expression problem is the protocol. Protocols provide a flexible mechanism for abstraction that leverages the best parts of interfaces by providing only specification, not implementation, and by letting datatypes implement multiple protocols. Additionally, protocols address the key weaknesses of interfaces by allowing nonintrusive extension of existing types to support new protocols.
Following are the strengths of protocols:
-
Datatypes can implement multiple protocols.
-
Protocols provide only specification, not implementation, which allows implementation of multiple interfaces without the problems associated with multiple-class inheritance.
-
Existing datatypes can be extended to implement ...
Get Programming Clojure, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
