Some (potential) context to this is that at Clojure Conj there was a discussion of the potential for clojure expressions to become a standard data serialization format. The idea is that clojure data is significantly more rich than something like JSON.<p>In fact, as I understand it, some of the changes to the reader in 1.4 are aimed at working on this goal. You can read a little about this at <a href="http://dev.clojure.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=950382" rel="nofollow">http://dev.clojure.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=950382</a>