That may be true, but it's still a pretty idiomatic Clojure solution. Ask 10 Clojure programmers to solve this problem and most of them will come up with someth

That may be true, but it's still a pretty idiomatic Clojure solution. Ask 10 Clojure programmers to solve this problem and most of them will come up with something similar. Ask 10 C programmers and they will likely come back with a program much more similar to the one in the post. The fact that such functions are at a Clojure programmer's fingertips is exceptionally important. If you strip out the core functions (and macros) from any lisp or Clojure you are left with almost nothing( see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3482389/how-many-primitives-does-it-take-to-build-a-lisp-machine-ten-seven-or-five http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3482389/how-many-primitiv...).