Graphing Program: Closures¶

All of the functions that do the actual drawing of the graph (axes, lines, dots, etc.), need to convert graph coordinates (x, y) to the corresponding canvas coordinates, so the program needs a function like (to-screen [[x y]]). But wait—this function needs to know the minimum and maximum x and y as well as the width and height of the canvas. You don’t want to “hard code” the numbers into the function for a particular canvas size (300 x 200) and graph dimensions (x from 0 to 7 and y from 0 to 25):

(defn to-screen [[x y]]
  (let [sx (+ (* (/ (* 0.85 300) 7) x) (* 0.075 300))
        sy (+ (* (/ (* 0.85 200) 25) y) (* 0.075 200))]
    [sx sy]))

That would be good for only this one particular graph, and you might very well want to have more than one graph on a page. On the other hand, you don’t want to have to pass in all that information every time you do a conversion:

(defn to-screen[[x y] [min-x max-x] [min-y max-y] [w h]]
  (let [sx (+ (* (/ (* 0.85 (- max-x min-x))) (- x min-x)) (* 0.075 w))
        sy (+ (* (/ (* 0.85 (- min-y max-y))) (- y max-y)) (* 0.075 h))]
    [sx sy]))

Surely there must be a better way! (Insert obligatory Airplane joke here.) And indeed there is. You write a function that takes all those parameters and returns a conversion function to you. That’s the make-convert function in the following code:

At this point, you may have an objection: “Hold on a second. The symbols mx and my are local bindings that don’t exist outside of make-convert. Once it finishes returning the anonymous function, dom’t those bindings vanish?” Ordinarily, this is the case. However, when a function has access to symbols defined outside its scope (in this case, mx, min-x, etc.), those symbols do not vanish. Their values at the time the anonymous function was created are “locked in” to the definition and remain available. In computer science, this is referred to as a closure (not to be confused with the Clojure in ClojureScript). To paraphrase Wikipedia, a closure is a record storing a function together with the environment in which it was created.

This solves the problem nicely. You can create a to-screen function for any size canvas or graph you want and just pass that function as one extra argument to all the drawing functions rather than passing a boatload of arguments at every call.

Now that the coordinate conversion program is in place, it is time to start drawing the graph.