A diagram helps when you start getting into read/compile time discussions, see slides 13 through 17 of http://www.slideshare.net/adorepump/clojure-an-introducti

A diagram helps when you start getting into read/compile time discussions, see slides 13 through 17 of http://www.slideshare.net/adorepump/clojure-an-introduction-for-java-programmers http://www.slideshare.net/adorepump/clojure-an-introduction-... to see how the evaluation model for Clojure (which is similar enough to Lisp) differs from most other languages. One of the many differences between Clojure and Lisp though is that Lisp supports user-defined reader macro definitions, so you can add things like the nice persistent map literal syntax of Clojure to Lisp if you really want to.