This is a quick post to show an example of clojure comparator for sorting a list with sort.
At work a friend wrote dozen lines of java to sort a list of characters that represents t-shirt sizes. The sizes are: pp, p, m, mm, g, gg, a, aa. Where ‘pp’ is super small, ‘p’ small, ‘m’ medium, etc.
Some shees have all the sizes available, some not. So imagine a shirt with just g, a, gg, p sizes availabe. The screen should show: p, g, gg, a. He requested me to do a clojure version of it. Here it goes.
The first useful function is map-indexed. Since the order of sizes is not natural, we associate numbers to them given we know the size order. So sizes becomes {:a 6, :gg 5, :g 4, :pp 0, :m 2, :mm 3, :aa 7, :p 1}.
Then I used a comparator. It produces a java.util.Comparator for the given function. In this case the comparison of the map values for each key.
To finish that, the sort function. It takes a given product sizes list and sorts then. So '(p, g, gg, aa) becomes (p g gg a).
It is even silly for a blog post but what if I can convince him to replace the java methods/utils/whatever methods for a gen-class of it? Packing compiled clojure code and using them for utility functions and small piece of your application can be a good way to get used to the language and confidence to start a full application in it.
Actually to let this code reusable, one can take the list of sizes instead of hard coding it. But this is an exercise for you.
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