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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