Converted from http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure/tickets/5

Please see the attached patch which produces a (hopefully more clear) error message as shown below (given the broken code shown in the original bug report):

Clojure 1.4.0-master-SNAPSHOT
user=> (let [x 42 y 43] (+ x y))
85
user=> (let [[x y] {}] x)
UnsupportedOperationException left side of binding must be a symbol (found a PersistentVector instead).  clojure.lang.Compiler.checkLet (Compiler.java:6545)
user=>

In addition, this patch checks the argument of (let) as shown below:

user=> (let 42)
UnsupportedOperationException argument to (let)  must be a vector (found a Long instead).  clojure.lang.Compiler.checkLet (Compiler.java:6553)

Patch produced by doing git diff against commit ba930d95fc (master branch).

Sorry, this patch is wrong: it assumes that the left side of the binding is wrong - the [x y] in :

(let [[x y] {}] x)

because [x y] is a vector, when in fact, the left side is fine (per http://clojure.org/special_forms#let : "Clojure supports abstract structural binding, often called destructuring, in let binding lists".)

So it's the right side (the {}) that needs to be checked and flagged as erroneous, not the [x y].

Add patch better-error-for-let-vector-map-binding

This produces the following:

(let [[x y] {}] x)
Exception map binding to vector is not supported

There are other cases that are not handled by this though — like binding vector to a set

user=> (let [[x y] #{}] x)
UnsupportedOperationException nth not supported on this type: PersistentHashSet

Wondering if it might be better to try convert the map to a seq to support? Although this might be another issue.

Thoughts?

This seems too specific. Is this issue indicative of a larger problem that should be addressed? Even if this is the only case where bindings produce poor error messages, all the cases described above should be addressed in the patch.

Unfortunately, realized that this still does not cover the nested destructuring cases. Coming to the conclusion, that my approach above is not going to work for this.

File: clj-5-destructure-error.diff

Added support for nested destructuring errors

let [[[x1 y1][x2 y2]] [[1 2] {}]]
;=> UnsupportedOperationException let cannot destructure class clojure.lang.PersistentArrayMap.