Chapter 4. On scalars
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead[1]
1 Science and the Modern World (Macmillan, 1925).
This chapter covers
- Understanding precision
- Trying to be rational
- When to use keywords
- Symbolic resolution
- Regular expressions—the second problem
So far, we’ve covered a somewhat eclectic mix of fun and practical concerns. This brings us to a point where we can dive deeper into a fundamental topic: how Clojure deals with scalar values, including numeric, symbolic, and regular expression values, and how they behave as data and sometimes as code.