Tim: Rich talks about destructuring in the part about "let" on the "special forms" page.
The discussion of functions and basic syntax is deliberately delayed because of dependencies, e.g. evaluation can't really be understood without understanding the reader, and explaining the reader involves talking about lists, vectors, maps, and other types. Besides, I think a data-to-code approach is especially appropriate in Lisp. The decision to use cursory, abstract examples is deliberate. When you're trying to demonstrate how a language mechanism actually works, it's distracting when the code example is meant to actually do something because it makes the reader untangle the what from the how. With foo-bar code, the reader can focus on what exactly is happening in the code without reference to any goal. The other reason the text is example poor is that I deliberately avoid introducing syntax before semantics. Syntax is a lot of meaningless ascii jumble until you're familiar with the concepts being expressed. Of course, concrete examples should soon follow once the concepts are laid out, but I'm terrible and coming up with such examples. If you have any examples to add, please add them yourself (it is a wiki page). Something I don't like about examples--particularly long, practical examples--is that they fill up the text, segregating the core information into little chunks that are hard to browse. So instead of putting such examples in the main text, perhaps they can go on their own page where the main text simply links to them. Readers can decide for themselves if they need to see more context about a topic. Really, though, like with any expository writing, what are needed are guinea pigs to actually read the damn thing. Hopefully keeping the whole text reasonably short will encourage volunteers. Thanks for your feedback. --Brian Will --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
