Map Construction

Today we want to write a line or two of code that will take a vector of keys and a vector of values and construct a map to link them.  Without using the built-in functions to do this, of course.

Well, the function (assoc m k v) takes a map m and returns the (possibly) large map created by adding the key-value combination of k and v.  So, we can loop through our vectors adding successive elements by pairs to a starting map, which we can initialise as the empty map, denoted {}.

As we do not know that the two vectors are the same length we check both of them and proceed only as long as they both have elements.

So our code looks like this:

(fn [ks vs]
  (loop [m {}, ks ks, vs vs]
    (if (and (seq ks) (seq vs))
      (recur (assoc m (first ks) (first vs)) (rest ks) (rest vs))
      m)))

At the start of the loop the map m that we are building is initialised to {}.  The two identifiers ks and vs represent the vectors of keys and values inside the loop and they are initialised to the values that are passed to the function.  When we recur these work their way through those initial values, to (rest ks) (rest (rest ks)) etc.