# Vectors¶

A vector is a series of items inside square brackets. You have seen vectors when you define functions; the parameter names are a vector. Vectors are normally the choice for related items rather than lists. Consider this vector of prices:

## Fundamental Operations¶

Again, look at the following operations that work on all collections, which includes vectors:

• first returns the first items in the collection
• rest returns a sequence of all the items except the first one
• last returns the last item in the collection
• butlast returns a sequence of all the items except the last one
• count gives you the number of items in the collection
• vector? returns true if its argument is a vector, false otherwise
• conj takes a collection and an item, and returns a new collection with that element added to the collection.

In the case of vectors, conj puts the new element at the end of the vector that it returns. Try these expressions in the following active code box, or use a series of println to do them all at once; for your convenience, the price-vector vector has been defined.

(first price-vector)
(rest price-vector)
(count price-vector)
(vector? price-vector)
(conj price-vector 7.86)


Remember that the result of all of these functions is a brand new vector; the original vector is immutable and remains untouched.

When you tried (rest price-vector), you may have noticed that the output did not have square brackets: the result was (6.8 2.49 5.33 1.99) That is because the result of the rest function is a sequence, as shown by the type function:

You can convert a sequence (or a list) into a vector by using the into function. The first argument to into is the destination collection. In the following example, that is an empty vector []. The second argument is the collection or sequence to be inserted into the destination:

There are two ways to access any arbitrary element in a vector. You can, as with lists, use the nth function, which takes a vector as its first argument and an index number as its second argument, where zero is the index of the first item in the vector. What happens if you give a negative number or a number greater than or equal to the number of items in the list? Try different index numbers and find out:

Or, if you wish, you can use the symbol as if it were a function and follow it with the index number:

OK, enough of this background—when are we going to actually do something with these collections? On the next page, that’s when.

Next Section - Manipulating Collections