Good point.

It is also worth noting that according to the Clojure reader (documented at http://clojure.org/reader), ' is allowed in Clojure symbols (and thus keywords):

Symbols begin with a non-numeric character and can contain alphanumeric characters and *, +, !, -, _, ', and ? (other characters may be allowed eventually).

I think this is an error in the edn specification.

See also https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure-dev/b09WvRR90Zc

Clojure, EDN, JSON compared in detail here (wow!): https://github.com/wagjo/serialization-formats

Printing all symbols of the core namespace gives +' as symbol. This cannot be parsed by a parser written after the spec. Who can fix the spec?

There seems to be a similar problem with the spec not allowing the "<" and ">" characters in symbols.

I think this is a spec bug. I created #89.