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1. Down the Rabbit Hole > Namespaces
At this point, we should understand much of how the nontrivial parts of the Clojure REPL (and therefore Clojure itself) work:
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Read: the Clojure reader reads the textual representation of code, producing the data structures (e.g., lists, vectors, and so on) and atomic values (e.g., symbols, numbers, strings, etc.) indicated in that code.
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Evaluate: many of the values emitted by the reader evaluate to themselves (including most data structures and scalars like strings and keywords). We explored earlier in Expressions, Operators, Syntax, and Precedence how lists evaluate to calls to the operator in function position.
The only thing left to understand about evaluation now is how symbols are evaluated. So far, we’ve used them to both name and refer to functions, locals, and so on. Outside of identifying locals, the semantics of symbol evaluation are tied up with namespaces, Clojure’s fundamental unit of code modularity.
