I've been reading the latest chapter from Stuart's book, Chapter 7:
Macros, and he makes this statement:
"Clojure has no special syntax for code. Code is simply Clojure data.
This is true for normal functions, but also for special forms and
macros. Consider a language with syntax, such as Java. ..."
It seems to me that just like all lisps, Clojure has syntax. The
first and most obvious piece of syntax is the parenthesises. Lists
start with an open paren and end with a closing paren. This is syntax
and you can't change it with a macro.
Next is the single quote, which is just an alias for quote. Somewhere
along the line, someone decided that (quote foo) was too verbose and
they wanted 'foo to be syntactic sugar for (quote foo). That wasn't
and can't be done as a macro. For example, if I wanted to define my
own single quote, say $foo, I can't without modifying the parser.
Clojure goes on to add a lot of syntax. The literal syntax for
vectors [], maps {}, sets #{}, functions #(), keywords :, etc. are all
syntax, not possible with macros, and then there are all the "reader
macros" that are listed in Section 2.2, Comment ;, Deref @, Meta ^,
Metadata #^, regex #"", syntax-quote `, unquote ~, unquote-splicing
~@, and var-quote #'.
So is it really valid to claim Clojure has no syntax?
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