Re: Working with generic functions

[moon (David A. Moon)]

> Date: Wed, 2 Dec 92 13:58:28 EST
> From: Kenneth Knight <krk@oit.itd.umich.edu>
>  
> I am writing methods to do some basic combinatorics (permutation, r-permutation
> , combinations, and so on). The problem is that I'd like to access the 'permute'
> function in two ways: 1. as P(n) for permuting an entire set of objects; and,
> 2. as P(n,r) for permuting n objects in r subsets. I have factorial written
> and it works. My problem is that from what I can tell (and what Thomas,
> thank Mark Feeley for a nice embedded version) I can not create two methods
> called 'permute' with different number of parameters. The param-lists are
> not congruent. I would very much like to call both of the functions 'permute'
> but I do not want the aggrivation of having to type (permute 6 6) to find out
> how many permutations are in a 6 objet set. Is there a way I can manage this?

Use keyword arguments.

(define-method permute (n #key (r n)) ...)
(permute 6)
(permute 6 r: 4)

You might want to choose a more mnemonic keyword name than r.