Code run in REPL but not if saved to a file

Question

I'm trying to create a text based Clojure game (inspired by Land of Lisp).

(def *nodes* {:living-room "you are in the living-room. a wizard is snoring loudly on the couch."
              :garden "you are in a beautiful garden. there is a well in front of you."
              :attic "you are in the attic. there is a giant welding torch in the corner."})

(defn describe-location [location nodes]
    (nodes location))

The code is running in the REPL but if I saved the code to a file and trying to run:

(describe-location :attic *nodes*)

I got:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Wrong number of args (1) passed to: user$describe-location (wizard-game.clj: 0)

What I'm doing wrong?
Here is the file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3630641/wizard-game.clj

Answer 1

You have too many parentheses. Instead of (describe-location(:garden *nodes*)), you want (describe-location :garden *nodes*).

Remember that the name of the function goes after the open paren, not before: you were calling (:garden *nodes*) and then calling describe-location on the result, which failed because describe-location wants two arguments, not one.

Answer 2

one potential problem is that the version of the function that is loaded into the repl in the 'user' name space may not be the one you expect, so you may want to (load "wizard-game.clj") into a fresh REPL. though many people are using leiningen for this these days, except for the good number of people using maven directly.

---

first give your're game a namespace

(ns com.me.myGame ....)

then you can load it into the repl by running

(use 'com.me.myGame)

and call the functions by either their name-space-qualified names

(com.me.myGame/describe-location :attic)

or from the repl switch into that namespace:

(in-ns 'com.me.myGame)
(describe-location :attic)

---

or you can use leiningen to create your project and name-space automatically. leiningen is worth it in this case because it just took me longer to write this sentence than to make a project with lein. There are a lot of good tutorials for leiningen.

lein new wizard-game

and then edit src/wizard-game/core.clj. this will let you add dependencies later with out fuss if when the project grows to world-famous-success