I’m reading through Programming Clojure and was struck by one of their examples on lazy-seq. They didn’t go into detail because they will be going more in detail on lazy evaluation on a future chapter. The started to analyze the code:

A few things of note:

• This is not a function definition. This is binding primes to a list which is lazy evaluated.
• The function primes-from is named twice. Once for the let to get local scoping and as the name argument for fn so that this function has a name. The name is required in this case because it is called recursively.
• The if condition checks to see if n is divisible by any of the previous subset of primes. It is not necessary to check the complete previously generated primes because mathematically only numbers \$$\sqrt{n} \$$ is a possible divisors of \$$n\$$.
• In take-while in the if conditional, it is necessary to find a value to test that is included in the previous cached values of primes. For instance, if you had

This would never end (infinite recursion) because let’s say n = 8. primes would return [2 3 5 7], which are all less than 8 so it will try to fetch the next prime number from primes, which is exactly what it was trying to do in the first place. Thus it gets caught in an infinite recursion. You need the test to have a failure point (ie where it evaluates to false) within the precomputed list. So in the original code (take-while #(< (* % %) n) primes, 3 does the trick since (< 9 n) (n=8 in this case) stops the take-while from continuing.

• (recur (+ n f) r) is allowed to be used instead of a normal recursive call because it is the last line of executable code of the function primes-from. recur works just like a recursive call without building a new stack – for efficiency.
• The recur in the if clause don’t have lazy-seqbecause we haven’t found a prime and we want it to keep searching.
• The else clause needs a lazy-seq because it found the next prime and wants to have that value available and we do not want to have the recursive call to prime-from executed here but at the time when it gets evaluated. In effect it is putting a marker here to say what it needs to execute when it the evaluator sees it.
• The recursive call in the else clause cannot use recur because there is code that needs to be executed after prime-from returns with it’s value.
• The following code could be written another way from

to

• Seems like lazy-seq needs to have a recursive call in the body otherwise it throws an exception.
• The wheel is just a set of increments used to find the next number to test for a prime. Since we know that 2, 3, 5, 7 are prime, we can skip multiples of these. Once you get the list of offsets, they cycle.