Getting Clojure

The Homoiconic Advantage

So there’s our answer: Clojure’s syntax is the way it is because it’s amphibious, equally at home representing code and data. Having a single text format along with a single in-memory representation of both code and data is not just elegant; it also has some serious practical advantages. For example, writing Clojure code-analysis tools is very straightforward. Need to read a file full of Clojure code? No problem:

(ns codetool.core
  (:require [clojure.java.io :as io]))

(defn read-source [path]
  (with-open [r (java.io.PushbackReader. (io/reader path))]
    (loop [result []]
      (let [expr (read r false :eof)]
        (if (= expr :eof)
          result
          (recur (conj result expr)))))))

Call read-source with the path to a Clojure ...