Maps, vectors, sets, and lists are the basic data structures provided by Clojure. As you’ve seen already, each of these has its own convenient literal notation:

'(a b :name 12.5)       ;; list

['a 'b :name 12.5]      ;; vector

{:name "Chas" :age 31}  ;; map

#{1 2 3}                ;; set

{Math/PI "~3.14"
 [:composite "key"] 42
 nil "nothing"}         ;; another map

#{{:first-name "chas" :last-name "emerick"}
  {:first-name "brian" :last-name "carper"}
  {:first-name "christophe" :last-name "grand"}}  ;; a set of maps

These categories of data structures and their notations are likely familiar to you for the most part; particularly with regard to notation, Ruby and Python are quite similar. However, Clojure data structures have a couple of distinctive characteristics: