You’ve already used and worked with vars a great deal. Vars differ from Clojure’s other reference types in that their state changes are not managed in time; rather, they provide a namespace-global identity that can optionally be rebound to have a different value on a per-thread basis. We’ll explain this at length starting in Dynamic Scope, but first let’s understand some of their fundamentals, since vars are used throughout Clojure, whether concurrency is a concern or not.

Evaluating a symbol in Clojure normally results in looking for a var with that name in the current namespace and dereferencing that var to obtain its value. But we can also obtain references to vars directly and manually dereference them: