Chapter 19Read and Eval
Programming-language syntax is a lot like politics: very few people do it for a living but virtually everyone has an opinion. And many have strong opinions. Certainly it’s not hard to find strong opinions about Clojure’s syntax. Many of us love what we see as its elegant terseness while some programmers can only see parentheses. Lots and lots of parentheses.
Clojure’s somewhat odd syntax is not the shady outcome of a conspiracy of parentheses manufacturers. Nor is it a completely arbitrary esthetic choice. Clojure’s syntax is an integral part of how the language works. So in this chapter we’re going to look at the two critical functions at the heart of Clojure, read and eval, and at how they relate to all those parentheses. ...
Get Getting Clojure now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
