Syntaxlessness#

There is no such word as "syntaxlessness". We had to make it up to showcase that Lisps don't have a syntax.

You might be wondering, "But Shivek, we just studied Clojure's syntax in the last lesson, and now you say that Lisps don't have a syntax!?" We know that our statement sounds a little odd, but it will make sense by the end of this lesson.

In a C-family language like JavaScript, the following conditional is common:

if (a > b) {

  console.log(a)

} else {

  console.log(b)

}

The equivalent Clojure version of this conditional will look something like:

(if (> a b)

  (prn a)

  (prn b))

The if function expects three elements in a list: the condition, the truthy block, and the falsy block.

Notice how if and > are just functions, unlike in C-style languages, where if, else and > are a part of the syntax.

Expressiveness#

Since Clojure is a functional language and there is no syntax in the sense of C-style languages, Clojure code is more expressive and concise.

The example that we started with can be re-written as:

(prn (if (> a b) a b))