and why you probably won’t need them

I was thinking it would be nice to have a type of structure that would know in what index each of its parameters is stored. Why might this be useful? Because then you don’t need to know the name of the type to access its data.

It is simple enough to make a wrapper around defstruct . First define a constant that stores a map of parameter name to index, and then keep a reference to that constant at a fixed position in the structure.

( defmacro defstruct* (struct-name &rest params) ( let ((constant (intern (format "%s--params" struct-name)))) `( progn ( defconst ,constant (_params-indices-map 2 ,@params)) ( defstruct ,struct-name (param-indices ,(list 'quote constant)) ,@params))))

For the map, we’re going to use an association list, and something like a b c should expand to ((a . 2) (b . 3) (c . 4)) . As the first two slots in the vector are taken up by the structure name and the map itself, indices start at 2.

( defmacro _params-indices-map (counter &rest params) ( if params `(cons (cons ,(list 'quote (car forms)) ,counter) (_params-indices-map (1+ ,counter) ,@(cdr params))) nil))

But we didn’t really need a recursive macro here at all. And they are painful to debug.

(macroexpand '(_params-indices-map 2 a b c)) ;; expands to (cons (cons (quote a) 2) (_params-indices-map (1+ 2) b c))

We could have used a function much more easily.

( defun _params-indices-map (params) ( let ((counter 2) retval) ( dolist (var params) (push (cons var counter) retval) (setq counter (1+ counter))) retval))

defstruct* needs to be fixed up slightly. We no longer need to pass the counter in to _params-indices-map.

( defmacro defstruct* (struct-name &rest params) ( let ((constant (intern (format "%s--params" struct-name)))) `( progn ( defconst ,constant (_params-indices-map '(,@params))) ( defstruct ,struct-name (param-indices ,(list 'quote constant)) ,@params))))

(defstruct* struct a b c) (cdr (assoc 'a struct--params)) ;; --> 2 (make-struct) ;; --> [cl-struct-struct struct--params nil nil nil]

Now of course, this won’t work correctly for more complex structures that initialise their parameters. Fixing that is left as an exercise for the reader 🙂