Clojure: Reader Forms

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

This page is WORK IN PROGRESS.

symbols begin with a non-numeric character. Can contain 0 to 9, a to z, * + ! - _ ?

/ is used once to separate namespaces.

. has special meaning — it can be used one or more times in the middle of a symbol to designate a fully-qualified class name, for example, java.util.BitSet, or in namespace names.

Symbols beginning or ending with . are reserved by Clojure.

Symbols containing / or . are said to be 'qualified'.

Symbols beginning or ending with : are reserved by Clojure. A symbol can contain one or more non-repeating ':'s.

forms
lisps refer to its syntax units as “forms”. For example, (+ 3 4) is a form. Anything that returnsa value is a form.
literal
a form that eval to itself. String "…", number, character \b, are literals. true, false, nil, are also literals.
symbol
Symbols are like other lang's identifiers, except that lisp symbol is a identity that can be held unevaluated and be manipulated in unevaluated state. For example, if x has value of 3 (def x 3), then 'x eval to the symbol “x” itself, not its value. Macros are possible because of this. (You can think of “symbol” as a string, a label, a identifier.)
expressions
a form made of other forms. Typically they are enclosed by brackets. For example, list (…), vector […], map {…}. Normally, a form is a function in the form of a list (head …). The first element is the symbol of the function. The rest are arguments, and are evaluated in order.
special form
a form that has different evaluation order or special in some other way. For example, if is a special form. http://clojure.org/special_forms