Alternate version of swap! also returning swapped out value

Question

I talked about this a bit on IRC\'s #clojure channel today but would like to go more in detail here. Basically, in order to better understand atoms, swap!

Answer 1

Clojure's swap! is just a spinning compare-and-set. You can define an alternate version that returns whatever you like:

(defn alternate-swap [atom f & args]
  (loop []
    (let [old @atom
          new (apply f old args)]
      (if (compare-and-set! atom old new)
        [old new]  ; return value
        (recur)))))