I think of it this way too but was really trying to get a formal definition, if one exists.
While I've not seen a formal grammar of Clojure anywhere, I have looked at https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/clojure/lang/LispReader.java which seems to show that forms can be a lot of things, including READ_FINISHED and READ_EOF, which probably aren't intended for public consumption. :) The actual read() function (or method, as this is all written in Java), looked promising but was hard to decipher. Maybe the term is intentionally vague? I was hoping it wasn't. But the fact that it is hard to find a hard definition of it makes me wonder. Thanks On Monday, December 28, 2015 at 5:08:36 AM UTC-8, Gregg Reynolds wrote: > > > On Dec 28, 2015 6:58 AM, "Ray Toal" <[email protected] <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > > Throughout the Clojure documentation there are many references to forms. > > > > I know about special forms, macros, vars, symbols, keywords, integers, > doubles, ratios, sets, maps, lists, vectors, booleans, nil, etc. > > > > What exactly, though, is a form? > > A syntactic unit, as opposed to a lexical unit? Left paren is a lexical > unit, to "read it you have to find the following balanced right paren, and > if everything in between is syntactically correct you have a list form. At > least that's how I think of it. > > Gregg > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. 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 --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
