Doing Sequences

So I have invested in The Joy Of Clojure by Fogus & Houser. I just felt like buying a book. Well, with a few of their tips I can update my scheme for transforming sequences. One observation is that "quoting the empty list isn't idiomatic Clojure" (p.34) - so you don't have to write '() because () will do. Another observation is that the idiomatic way to test whether a sequence is empty is to use (seq s), which returns nil if (empty? s), and nil evaluates to boolean false. On p.87 they point out that you can remove that call to reverse on closing a sequence transformation by starting with a vector and using conj instead of cons. So instead of:

(defn copy-sequence-1 [sq]
  (loop [src sq, dest ()]
    (if (seq src)
      (recur
        (rest src)
        (cons (first src) dest))
      (reverse dest))))


You can do this:

(defn copy-sequence-2 [sq]
  (loop [src sq, dest []]
    (if (seq src)
      (recur
        (rest src)
        (conj dest (first src)))
      dest)))


You get a vector back but that's not a problem. In fact we read "in idiomatic Clojure code lists are used almost exclusively to represent code forms" (p.90) - for data rather than code "lists rarely offer any value over vectors".