I was wondering this too, and deliberately tried to break something using the clojure 1.5 reader with read-eval false. (Makes a change from building things all

I was wondering this too, and deliberately tried to break something using the clojure 1.5 reader with read-eval false. (Makes a change from building things all day!). Result: user=> (binding [*read-eval* false] (read-string "``````````x")) OutOfMemoryError Java heap space clojure.lang.RT.cons (RT.java:570)