Randall,
Well said, and I need to find a place to make this explanation in the
book prior to chapter 7. :-)
Stuart
> On Thursday 11 December 2008 13:37, Paul Barry wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Punctuation is not syntax. Lisp can be said to have a syntax, that of
> the S-Expression. Beyond that, as someone else pointed out in another
> thread here recently, when we write Lisp code, we're basically writing
> directly the AST that other languages would need a parser implementing
> a complicated grammar to produce.
>
>
>> 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 #'.
>
> All these things are syntactic sugar. Shorthand ways to write things
> that have vanilla S-Expression counterparts. Again, I would not call
> them syntax.
>
>
>> So is it really valid to claim Clojure has no syntax?
>
> Very nearly so.
>
>
> Randall Schulz
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