On 1 Apr 2010, at 13:04, Meikel Brandmeyer wrote:
Clojure being still young and in flux at certain areas doesn't
contradict a currently valid, authoritative documentation. It may be
that the list for allowed characters in a symbol is extended at some
point in time. However this does not mean that the current list is not
authoritative now, but only that at that point in time it will be
replaced with a new list which is just as authoritative from then on.
Then it just remains to be defined what "authoritative" means - and we
are on the best way to a philosophical discussion list, rather than
one on Clojure programming.
From a pragmatic point of view, I'd summarize the situation as follows:
- The Clojure documentation lists which characters can be used in
symbols. If you care about long-term portability, you'd best stick to
those, though no one will sign a contract guaranteeing this list
forever.
- Many additional characters work fine in all Clojure releases until
now, but no promise is made for the future. These characters include
some punctuation and most of non-ASCII Unicode.
- A small subset of these additional characters (mostly punctuation)
are used in clojure.core. Given that clojure.core has no special
status from an implementation point of view, it is reasonable to
expect that the same characters can safely be used elsewhere, but
that's an extrapolation.
- Two characters, . and /, are treated specially even though this is
not or not clearly stated in the documnentation. Better don't use
those in unqualified symbols.
- Two symbols, ns and in-ns, are treated specially in var lookups.
They will always resolve to their meanings in clojure.core, even if
defined differently in some other namespace. This is not documented
and may be a temporary feature of the current documentation.
Konrad.
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