Using infix formulas in Incanter

There's a lot to like about lisp: macros, the simple syntax, and the rapid development cycle. Most of the time, it is fine if you treat math operators as functions and use prefix notations, which is a consistent, function-first syntax. This allows you to treat math operators in the same way as everything else so that you can pass them to reduce, or anything else you want to do.

However, we're not taught to read math expressions using prefix notations (with the operator first). And especially when formulas get even a little complicated, tracing out exactly what's happening can get hairy.

Getting ready

For this recipe we'll just need Incanter in our project.clj file, so we'll use the dependencies statement—as well as the use statement—from the Loading Clojure data structures into datasets recipe.

For data, we'll use the matrix that we created in the Converting datasets to matrices recipe.

How to do it…

Incanter has a macro that converts a standard math notation to...