I was in the #lisp chat room at Freenode when someone posed a question about performing a map function over a nested lists. This was an interesting problem, so I thought that I would cover it here.
Suppose there was a complex tree of numbers:
((1 2) (3 4))
And you want to map each to a function (let’s say a squaring function) and maintain its structure. This is where a good utility function would be in order. The function must be able to handle trees of an unknown structure. So, the only solution that I know would be to use recursion:
(defun nested-map (fn item) (cond ((null item) nil) ((atom item) (funcall fn item)) ((consp item) (cons (nested-map fn (car item)) (nested-map fn (cdr item))))))
Even though it looks complex, the function seems correct:
CL-USER> (nested-map #'(lambda (x) (* x x)) '((1 2) (3 4))) ((1 4) (9 16)) CL-USER> (nested-map #'(lambda (x) (* x x)) '(1 2 (3 4 (5 6 7)))) (1 4 (9 16 (25 36 49)))
I think I’ll keep this in my utility toolkit. I am concerned about the performance, but I won’t worry too much about it until it becomes a problem.
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